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CopigM'N?.__ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


















YOU GAN FIND GOD 








YOU GAN FIND GOD 


BY 

EDWARD SHILLITO 

M 



Willett, Clark & Company 

CHICAGO NEW YORK 


1937 



Copyright 1937 by 
WILLETT, CLARK & COMPANY 


Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press 


Norwood, Mass.-La Porte, Ind. 









English Edition 
by Rich & Cowan, Ltd. 


115837 



APR -9 1938 



Illlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllli 


CONTENTS 


Introduction i 

I. Do We Want to Find God? 5 

II. What Is This Life Good For? 19 

III. Along What Roads? 31 

IV. Seeking God in Church 47 

V. Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 60 

VI. The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 73 

VII. The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 87 

VIII. The Seeker Who Is Sought 103 

IX. Ways in Which He May Find Us 118 

X. The Judge Who Comes to Meet Us 133 

XI. Can Seekers Find Now? 146 

Epilogue: What If You Do Find? 157 




















































































































































































































YOU GAN FIND GOD 

















































































Illlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll^ 


INTRODUCTION 


IT IS high time that those who speak of the Christian 
gospel drop the apologetic tone. Our Lord is either 
the mighty Redeemer, living in the power of an end¬ 
less life, or he is simply a dead hero about whom the 
world in the present time will be little concerned. A 
Christ reduced to the stature of a noble man of an¬ 
cient times will interest nobody. Tire battle will rage, 
and it will be a fierce battle, between those who deny 
him and those who glory in him. The others will be 
brushed aside. 

For himself and his own part in such a book as this 
the writer can think of a thousand apologies. For the 
gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ he is not prepared to 
offer one single by-your-leave; it is still the power of 
God whereby alone mankind, church, each nation and 
the family of nations, can be delivered. 

It is high time that Christian teachers ceased to offer 
the Word on the ground that it will be useful through 
aiding mankind to meet the perils of upheavals and 
revolutions in human society. It is not first of all to 
be commended as beneficial, but as true. Some de¬ 
fenders of the faith appear to argue that here in Christ 
is a valuable framework for human society. It is as 
when the squire used to go to church in order to set 
a good example and to preserve order in the parish! 




2 


You Can Find God 

Or as when a man is honest because it is the best 
policy. The gospel is not a device for preserving 
things as they are. It does bring healing for nations, 
as well as for individual souls, but never for those who 
seek to use it and not first of all yield to its demands. 
When they would have made Jesus king, he withdrew 
himself from the midst of them. That he will still do, 
if we think that we shall use him. 

It is high time that in our discussions of religion we 
be not afraid of the name of God. We have yielded 
too long to the defect of our religious thinking, that 
we are much more willing to talk of synagogics — that 
is, of things which concern the organization of the 
church — than of God. As a character in Mr. Hum¬ 
bert Wolfe's satire says: 

“ When He ventures to intrude 
He doesn't seem the Bible’s voice of thunder 
So much as a distressing social blunder.” 

The time for this cowardice, which is falsely called 
reverence, is past; and it is a cause for thankfulness 
that among the youth of today there is a growing readi¬ 
ness to demand from Christian teachers that they be 
not apologetic upon the one theme which matters. 
They ask of the church: “ What have you to tell us 
about God? That is your business! ” 

It is high time that we made once more our ap¬ 
peal to the individual soul. “ Individualism is dead,” 
many maintain. “ There is no life which is not lived 
in community. There is no such thing as a churchless 
Christianity.” All these things are true. But it does 
not follow that there are not decisions of critical im¬ 
portance to be made in the individual mind and con- 


Introduction 3 

science. It still is of importance if somewhere a Saul 
of Tarsus sees a light brighter than that of noon, or if 
a John Wesley has his heart strangely warmed. This 
book is written in the belief that the reader, without 
tarrying for any, can himself go out in search of God; 
and that once more the Lord says: “ What is that to 
thee? Follow thou me.” 

It is high time that we listened once more to the 
words of St. Paul: “ Wherefore he saith. Awake thou 
that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall 
give thee light.” 

It is high time that in the music of the Christian 
church we hear again in such words the sound of the 
silver trumpet. The days are over in which any other 
summons will be heard by the desperate children of 
men. But times are such that the brave will welcome 
the hazards and the terrors of the conflict. In the 
tumult Christ their Lord will draw near to them, and 
with him they will walk unafraid into the unknown 
future. 




































































I 


DO WE WANT TO FIND GOD? 


WE CAN find God, but do we want to find him? 

It cannot be said that all men are seeking for him, 
nor of any man that he is always seeking for him. At 
the most it can be claimed that every man at some 
time in this life has believed in a God who is found 
by those who seek him, and few men have not set out 
upon that search, even if they have taken only a few 
steps. 

It is well not to take too much for granted. We 
have to deal with man as he is, and not set up an 
imaginary being, either too spiritual on the one hand 
or too animal on the other. We must begin where 
we are. “ If it is to Dublin you are going,” the Irish¬ 
man said to the inquirer, “ I wouldn't start from here.” 
If it is our purpose to look for God, we may find it 
hard to start from here. We might wish for some 
other starting point; but there is none. The first of 
all conditions in this as in all journeys is that, being 
what we are, we should deal with things as they are 
and set out from where we are. 

Nothing is more fatal than to play tricks with the 
factors which make up a problem. The schoolboy 
who juggles the working of a sum in order to reach 
the answer which he has looked up, is simply wasting 
his time. He will either remain in ignorance, or have 
5 




6 You Can Find God 

to return to the very beginnings of his subject. We, 
too, if we would enter upon the search for God, must 
not cook up the answer. This we do if we set up 
for ourselves an imaginary being who has no relation 
to the real man, and follow his search. 

For it is we who must seek. We — not the seekers 
of other days with the facts as they dealt with them; 
not those spiritual athletes whose records we can study 
in biographies; not the mystics, who must have God; 
not Enoch, who walked with him, nor Moses, who 
spoke with him as a man speaks to his friend. Our 
case is not theirs; and the question is whether we, not 
such as they, can find God. We, as we are today, not 
as we were in other years; not as we might have been 
today if we had lived differently. We, with our past 
written and never to be unwritten. We, with our 
master interests already determined, with grooves in 
our thinking, now both deep and wide; with our char¬ 
acters shaped so that our friends make allowance for 
us and say harshly or tolerantly, “ We must not forget 
that he is timid, or selfish, or quick-tempered, or self- 
indulgent/' Do we, being such as we are, want to find 
God? 

When Jesus called Simon to follow him, he did not 
call a man about whom nothing distinctive could be 
said. It was not man, but this man whom he called. 
He saw in Simon an individual unit, waiting for that 
call. In Simon lived the memory of his race. He 
was what he was because patriarchs had fought with 
the angel of God for God's blessing, and seers had 
passed into the thick darkness where God was; a 
thousand lives lived on in him. Simon was not one 
of a crowd, indistinguishable from the rest. He was 


Do We Want to Find God? 7 

now to make a new beginning, but he did not cast 
off his character and disposition. He was that Simon 
who had been an impulsive boy, and a man rash and 
easily moved, and he would still be the same. So we 
see him at Caesarea Philippi saying at one moment, 
“ Thou art the Christ,” and at the next, when his 
Master spoke of the cross, becoming the spokesman 
of the Tempter, “ Be this far from thee.” Simon was 
himself as he had been and he was now also a dis¬ 
tinctive being who held the key to many lives. Be¬ 
tween the past ages and the hidden future there was 
this being. Jesus sought him. He had to start from 
where he was, being the man that he was. So he left 
his nets and followed him. 

The mystic will not be interested in a book with the 
title. You Can Find God . Of course he can find 
God. But the spiritual man, mystic or not, does not 
claim any special table for himself. He does not set 
himself above the others. He does not claim a place 
at the right hand of the King. Why should he? He 
knows that in the sight of the eternal Lord men are 
not far removed from one another. From that height 
the low foothills and the snow-clad mountaintops are 
not so distant from each other as they look to us. The 
spiritual man does not give himself airs. He seeks no 
private entrance to the temple. What he has found 
anyone may find. What has he that he did not first 
receive? 

But it is not with such a man, disciplined already 
by long years of hardship on pilgrimage, that this book 
has to do. He may think of himself as on our level, 
but we cannot think of ourselves as on his. Nor can 
we take shelter behind him and play at being like him, 


8 You Can Find God 

using his words and borrowing his visions. We must 
not live on borrowed capital. “ Ye hypocrites, ye 
actors,” Jesus said, and he spoke not to Pharisees alone. 
We may miss God through pretending that we have 
found him. 

It is with us, as we are in our present condition, that 
this book has to do. 

The Christian faith is not meant for the mystic and 
the spiritual only. There is not, and there can never 
be, an inner area reserved for the few, while the many 
must be left to content themselves with an outer realm. 
It is perhaps a pity that when we meet a Christian we 
will call him a mystic. No church is worthy of the 
name which has nothing to give to the unspiritual. 
The Lord of the church was known as the friend of 
publicans and sinners, and the church is not above its 
Lord. Men have left certain churches because they 
found everything in their worship and their com¬ 
munity life arranged on the supposition that everyone 
who took part was spiritual. Their language was in 
the key of an unearthly devotion. Hymns told of 
aspirations which only the saints in their hours of 
vision could feel. The language, long after the re¬ 
vival is over, is kept in the key set in seasons of revival. 
How could those who do not share such raptures be 
anything but interlopers, like strangers who find them¬ 
selves by some error in a select house party? The 
church is no church which provides only for a house 
party of saints. 

It is no defense of such a church to appeal to the 
New Testament; unreal language is often used of the 
early churches which are described in its pages. But 
however high their standards it is plain that they made 


Do We Want to Find God? 9 

provision for the unspiritual man who had yet to make 
the first steps in the Way, and they were long-suffer¬ 
ing with him. In what church, except in the mission 
field, could we meet today saints as imperfect, and 
indeed as unspiritual, as some of those with whom St. 
Paul worshiped in Corinth? The early church was a 
school for saints, but a school with many departments 
and with provision for backward scholars. 

But however strange and embarrassing a spectacle 
the plain man may think himself to be in some 
churches, he need have no fear that he is strange or 
unwanted in the presence of the Lord of the church. 
Christ's word is still, “ Him that cometh unto me, I 
will in no wise cast out this is the open invitation 
which is in the very character of the gospel. It is not 
to the spiritual genius, but to every man, that the good 
news is brought, and the Lord Christ still hides many 
things from the wise and prudent and reveals them 
to babes. There are strange warnings that those are 
last here which shall be first. 

We need not pretend to be other than we are. We 
may even discover as we proceed on the journey that 
the spiritual man is not one who is enriched by a sixth 
sense, but that he is very much like ourselves in his 
gifts. He is not in a class by himself. What he has 
become we may become. In any case, without wait¬ 
ing for exalted moods and without hiding our real 
character, we can begin the search for the living God. 

It is not a God undefined for whom we have to seek, 
but this God; it is not anyone in general who is called 
to the search, but you. 


io 


You Can Find God 

Where we are: that is our starting point. Simon 
and Andrew started from their fishing nets, Levi from 
his customs table. It may be said that they left their 
old ways not because they were seeking, but because 
they had found their Lord. “ We have found him of 
whom Moses and the prophets spoke/' they said. But 
their obedience to the call was also the beginning of 
a life of adventure in which they were hammered and 
forged into instruments for the divine purpose. They, 
being such as they were, rose up and followed their 
Lord. The one condition they were ready to meet: 
They did want to seek; they did desire above all things 
to find God. They were at the beginning of a new 
life, pilgrims and seekers always. 

Do we want to find God? From among those who 
make no claims to “ being religious," as they put it, 
and are frankly unspiritual, there are many answers to 
this question. 

One man says: “ I have never given it much thought. 
I leave such matters to others. If I go to church, I 
go in the hope that I may find some help in doing my 
duty and in living a better life, but I do not think of 
seeking for God — that is above me; such words only 
suggest memories of the Scriptures or the language of 
hymns or sermons. I cannot honestly use them." 

Another answers: “ On the contrary, I do my best 
now to escape from all such thoughts. I remember a 
long time ago hearing preachers who stirred me for a 
short time; but that passed, and I have no desire to be 
moved again as I was then. Moody nearly had me 
once. But I got away and thought twice over the 
matter. Besides, it is on the cards that there may be 
nothing in religion at all. We shall die, and we may 


11 


Do We Want to Find God? 

never know that we are dead.” How much of such 
talk is bravado we cannot say; but no one need go far 
to hear it. 

Still another man says that his hour of interest in 
religion came with the uprising of love within him in 
the days of youth. 

“ Love wakes men once a lifetime each; 

They lift their heavy lids and look. 

And, lo, what one sweet page can teach, 

They read with joy, then shut the book.” * 

Love, he will explain, cast a glorious image on the 
screen of the universe; and this he took to be God. 

Another has become entirely absorbed by the prac¬ 
tical interests of his life. Slowly his outlook has been 
changed. His morning paper is always opened to the 
financial news first of all. Markets, amusements, sport 
— these are his real interests. He does not give him¬ 
self much time to think of religion. It sounds too 
much like something in the air. One world at a time, 
and this world, after all, is not a bad place. If there 
should prove to be a spiritual world he will come to 
know it in good time, and the God who rules it will 
not be too hard upon him; God will forgive — “ that 
is his business.” 

Another makes a working arrangement: so long as 
he can keep the thought of God confined to the inner 
area of the individual life, he will gladly acknowledge 
him. But he must be allowed to say for himself what 
manner of God he is prepared to accept. He must be 
left free, for example, to say to any prophet, or apostle, 
or minister of the church that he cannot accept his 

* Coventry Patmore. 


12 


You Can Find God 

teaching if he preaches a God who takes sides in prac¬ 
tical matters of the business or social order. Religion, 
yes; but religion which accepts the present order of 
things; religion within the framework of things as they 
are. 

But we cannot so “ halve the gospel of God's grace 
we cannot make terms with God. The present order 
may be well suited to our tastes; but what right have 
we to assume that the Lord of the world makes special 
provision for us? Why should an order be preserved 
because it suits us? We cannot so limit God. If we 
want to find a God whose ways are designed to suit our 
needs, we shall look in vain. 

Such answers reveal clearly how mistaken it is to sup¬ 
pose that men are either seeking for God or are miser¬ 
able without him. No one verdict can be given. On 
the one side we have the words of St. Augustine that 
man is never at rest till he finds rest in God; on the 
other, the evidence everywhere that it is possible to 
pass through years of life without troubling about God 
at all. On the one hand there are those who find the 
peace which the world cannot give; on the other, 
those who find the peace which the world can and 
does give. 

There are two kinds of conversion. There have 
been some, indeed, who have been converted not to 
God, but from him. One such man expressed regret 
in his old age that he had spent so many years without 
knowing the delights of a godless life. Can such 
a verdict be possible? We must remember that in 
this present life we have not enough evidence to 
make a verdict on life certain and unanswerable. We 


Do We Want to Find God? 13 

must not credit a man with the right to pronounce 
finally upon his own policy. It may prove true — we 
believe that it will —that the man who has lived 
godless without any distress of mind has missed the 
purpose of this life: he will know this afterward, but 
for the present he does not know. 

Finding God, or trying to find him, is not a matter of 
what is called happiness. In the story of his life the 
Danish poet j0rgensen tells of a conversation between 
a freethinker and a French Catholic, a well known 
Parisian advocate. 

“ You are fortunate in being a believer,” the 
freethinker said. 

“ You are quite mistaken, sir. One is not at all 
fortunate when one is a believer. It is the great¬ 
est misfortune that can happen to you, to become 
a Christian. . . . You are fortunate, who do not 
believe in anything! You order your life as you 
please and at the same time keep your good con¬ 
science, and very possibly you will get into heaven 
at last, as it is presumably through no fault of 
yours that you are a freethinker and a heathen. 
We others have received the gift of faith and the 
responsibility it entails, and it often weighs so 
heavily upon us that we nearly faint under it, as 
under the burden of a cross.” * 

A paradox is presented here which a French thinker 
would love. It is not the whole truth; but if by 
“ fortunate ” we mean what the ordinary man means 
by that word, it is true that the man without faith 

* Johannes J0rgensen, Autobiography . English translation 
(Sheed & Ward), II, 217. 


14 You Can Find God 

is often more fortunate than are those who enter the 
kingdom of heaven. Much harm is done by those who 
always speak as if the unbelievers or skeptics were 
miserable. They used to delight in making legends 
to prove it. It is certainly not true to the facts of 
human society that mankind may be divided into the 
fortunate who believe and the miserable who do not 
believe. It is enough to say that no man must estimate 
the value of his life until all the evidence is before him. 
He may be happy enough now, but is that enough to 
know? In one of his sudden flashes of insight St. 
Augustine, telling of his early life, cried out, “ But 
was it life, O my God? ” 

How are we to account for the atheist? By that 
term is meant not the serious thinker who has con¬ 
vinced himself that there is no God, but the man who 
has based his practical life on the thesis: “ There is no 
God/' The atheist practices the absence of God. If 
he seeks anything at all it is to escape from the last 
traces of faith in God. He is not by any means un¬ 
familiar in our society. The atheist of the school of 
Ingersoll or Bradlaugh seldom raises his voice in these 
days; the atheist who is in flight from God is a com¬ 
mon figure. 

The very name, “ God," has linked to it certain 
vague thoughts. It does not suggest anything which 
the atheist would care to know better. It speaks of 
a discipline which he resents. If he were to find the 
God of whom he thinks hazily, he might be called to 
make changes and even revolutions in his way of living. 
So he becomes a pilgrim — a pilgrim hurrying away 
from God. 

Or he may be simply lazy or lacking in enterprise. 


Do We Want to Find God? 15 

He goes the way of least resistance. That is not hard 
to understand. Most men are tempted to settle down 
in life. A few climb the heights, but most are happy 
enough to look at them on the screen or on the map. 
We are proud that we belong to the race which pro¬ 
duced Columbus. But the world waited a long time 
for him. There was one Columbus, and the others 
were content to leave the voyaging to him. 

“ What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy, 

Judged that the earth like an orange was round? 

None of them ever said. Come along, follow me, 

Sail to the west and the east will be found/' 

It was not by processes of contemplation that 
America was discovered. The thinking had to be 
proved in action. There is always the temptation in 
religion to take the easy ways and to use the heroic 
speech without paying the price. 

We may refuse to seek because we are not disposed 
to run the hazards or pay the price. The search for 
God is not to be undertaken as though it were a 
matter of book learning or speculation. A survey of 
the facts with which we have to do does not justify 
any simplification. 

It is important in answering the question, “ What 
is man really like? ” and therefore, “ What am I? ” to 
remember the twofold character of human life. We 
have no right to forget that St. Francis and David 
Livingstone were men, and in a human life won their 
place among those of whom the world was not worthy, 
and of whom it is said that God is not ashamed to be 
called their God. On the other hand, there is the 
great multitude of those, also in our human company, 


V 


16 You Can Find God 

who do not aspire to or set out upon any such ad¬ 
ventures. We may be among them. We must not 
forget that we have fallen below our full stature. We 
may rise with Christ, but we may also escape from him. 
We are of the same family as St. Paul and Nero, as 
St. Francis and Borgia. 

Thinking soberly is a first condition of our search. 
Soberly does not mean despairingly. This book would 
not be written if there were not in the very heart of 
man a capacity for this search. The question whether 
or not we can find God would not have been asked. 

There are first of all two judgments to be rejected. 
Man is not to be treated either as a being who can 
hold his own before God with head lifted high and 
face unashamed, or as a being who is without any 
way by which God can approach him, without any 
language in which God can speak to him. Man can 
be neither presumptuous nor despairing. In him little¬ 
ness and greatness meet. He is not to be considered 
either a seeker always after God or one who cannot 
seek for him at all. It is wiser to keep to the bold 
paradoxes of Holy Scripture and say at once that man 
is little and great, a sinful creature who may become 
one of the sons of God; he is lost, and yet may be 
found. 

It may be against despair that we have to fight most 
resolutely. We may doubt human capacity for this 
endeavor. We may doubt man. 

There is a legend of Moses told in Hebrew lore. 
Moses had asked of the Lord of the World why he 
could not cross the border and enter into the Promised 
Land. 


Do We Want to Find God? 17 

Then God said: "Thou hast doubted me: I 
forgive thee. Thou hast doubted thyself: I for¬ 
give thee. But thou hast doubted Israel, thou 
hast doubted mankind, wherefore thou shalt not 
enter into this land of my promise. Israel is laden 
with defilements; but whence comest thou if it 
be not from Israel? . . . Men are cowardly, per¬ 
verse, envious, lustful, lying, thieving, murder¬ 
ous and blaspheming: but what art thou, if not 
a man? What thou hast comprehended, me, 
wherefore should not the others one day com¬ 
prehend it also? ” * 

Wherefore! Wherefore, if others like ourselves have 
journeyed and have seen and marveled, should not 
we also? True, we are conscious of all that makes it 
hard; but so were they. They attained; that is no rea¬ 
son for presumption, but it is a reason why we should 
not despair. 

From within our mysterious nature come voices 
which vary in clearness and power. Some are only like 
echoes with a dying cadence. But there is one call 
to which we cannot always close our ears. Sometimes 
it brings to us a start of surprise, but something within 
us answers to it. “ Before thou didst belong to this 
world of time, thou wert mine. I have graven thee 
upon mine hands, thou art mine/' 

If there were no such voice that we could hear 
and answer, how would the appeal of Book or Church, 
of Word or Sacrament come home to us? It is our 
confidence and our hope that we can hear. There is 
an inner land beneath the surface of life, like the con- 

* Edmond Fleg, Life of Moses. English translation (Victor 
Gollancz), p. 213. 


18 You Can Find God 

tinents below the sea . . . “ the dark-grey level plains 
of ooze, where the shell-burr’d cables creep/' It is 
because there is such a hidden life that the call to set 
out in search of God can be made with confidence. 
Whatever life may seem to be on the surface, it is not 
with that we have to do. However much, on the 
evidence of his outward life, man may despair of him¬ 
self and of Israel, there is still the world within him 
with which he must reckon. He may keep the door 
of his life barred, but he will not escape from the 
sound of the knocking upon the door. 


lllllllllllllllllllillllllllillllllllllllM 

II 


WHAT IS THIS LIFE GOOD FOR ? 


WE MAY or we may not seek for God, but we shall 
have to seek for something, or cease to be human. 

When the call of God comes to men it is not the 
first call or the only call that reaches them. In this 
respect it is in keeping with their character. They 
are not homekeepers now for the first time called to 
leave their firesides, not knowing which way they are 
going. Religion is not against the grain of human life. 

It is not open to anyone to say, “ I am no seeker; 
why, then, should I seek God? ” He may say, “ I am 
seeking other things and I am not prepared to turn my 
energies to this search/' He may not say, “ I am go¬ 
ing to stay at home; why, then, invite me to seek for 
God? ” He can only say, “ I have chosen some other 
road; I am not free to take this." 

It may be argued that this human life has no pur¬ 
pose at all, that the race is one without a starting point 
and without a goal, without penalties and without re¬ 
wards. There have always been those who are con¬ 
demned to such skepticism, but man has always found 
it difficult to rest content with such a verdict. If it 
is an idiot's story, why does the idiot know this? 
When the idiot knows he is an idiot, is he any longer 
an idiot? 

Or it may be that in the scene man is but an ac- 

19 





20 


You Can Find God 

cidental variation of little meaning in the sum of 
things. Of his own place in the universe man has 
thought much; he has been troubled beyond measure 
to know where he stands in the world of infinitely 
great and infinitely little things. But some imagine 
that he is only the victim of his own illusions. If that 
is our belief, we must accept it and build our life on 
this foundation. We must be content to write life 
down neither as a tragedy nor as a divine comedy, but 
as a modest tale of a creature who thought more highly 
of himself than he should have thought, but dis¬ 
covered his error at last and settled down to a life 
within strict limits and without aspiration. 

But a place in which we lived without aspiration 
would be much like hell. Indeed, this might be taken 
as a definition of hell. “ All hope abandon, ye who 
enter here/' were the words which Dante read at the 
entrance to the Inferno. Any place is hell over which 
such words could be written. 

In the poem “ Simpson's Choice," Clutton Brock 
describes how Simpson wakes up in the life beyond 
death to find, to his great delight, that his new scene 
is exactly like the one in which he had lived a selfish 
and worldly life. He had expected a worse fate. But 
the devil explains to him that it is in reality hell to 
which he has come. Of those who do not belong to 
that realm the devil says: 

“ Death brings no peace to them, for they are cursed, 
Just like fond mortals with immortal thirst 
For beauty, love and knowledge and what not; 

But here such vague abstractions are forgot. 

No friend of mine has ever asked for wings; 

We rest content with facts and concrete things." 


21 


What Is This Life Good For? 

But the place in which we live is not hell; it is earth, 
in which man still has longings and desires which will 
not let him rest. We are not doomed to despair or to 
settle down with things as they are. No such curse 
rests upon our race. 

We may find strong evidence that man is not a 
blunder, that nature has not all unconsciously be¬ 
trayed him, but that he is the heir of the world for 
whom all its history has been a preparation. In him, 
we believe, this world has come to its expression; the 
sealed orders under which all created things have 
moved have been broken. Is man the being for whom 
the whole creation groans and travails in pain — man 
as he is, called to be a son of God, heir of God and 
joint-heir with Christ? 

It is not part of the task which this book attempts 
to fulfill to present a case for this view of man. It is 
accepted at the outset that he is not deceived in his 
aspirations. If this claim were to be dismissed, then 
the belief that man can find God would fall to the 
ground. Only on the condition that human life is no 
mistake and no scene of illusion can we consider the 
call to seek the Lord. 

But if we believe that there is a purpose then we 
shall inquire what this purpose is, or, in other words, 
“ What is the place good for? ” There can scarcely 
be any doubt that if it is good for anything at all, it is 
as a place of struggle and conflict, whereby the creature 
man is educated for his calling. Or, if we take the 
words of our Lord, it is a place meant for those who 
ask, seek, knock; and the asking, seeking, knocking 
are not optional but essential. Not otherwise can man 
come to his place in the eternal world; not otherwise 


22 


You Can Find God 

are the sons of God to be revealed. Creation waits 
for that apocalypse. 

In our imagination we may see this as a world of a 
different character, one in which everything is pro¬ 
vided for its inhabitants without conflict or difficulty 
on their part. They receive without asking, they find 
without seeking, and without their knocking doors 
open to them. They have no need to dig the earth 
or sail the seas to win their bread. They have no mys¬ 
teries to explore, no enemies to meet, no tragedy to 
purify their hearts with terror. All is as neat and tidy 
as in some heaven of H. G. Wells. Such a world 
might have been, but it is not this world as we know 
it. The creatures that inhabited it would not be en¬ 
titled to the name of human. Nor will it serve any 
useful purpose to inquire what the policy of our life 
might be in such a world. We have to do with a 
scene of another kind in which man, if he has any 
meaning at all, is a being disciplined and schooled by 
struggle for some hidden and amazing purpose. 

If this is a drama with any plot at all it is a divine 
drama, and its title is, The Coming of the Sons of 
God; and God's sons can come into their glorious 
destiny only by taking their part in an action in which 
there is no sham fight. In this drama there are no 
earthly spectators. The children of earth, if they are 
to come to themselves, must be prepared in that drama 
not for peace but for the sword. They are not mario¬ 
nettes pulled by strings, soon, when their entertain¬ 
ment is over, to be put back in the box. They are real 
beings in a world which is no illusion. They must seek 
as living actors, and seeking is in the very character 
of the place they live in. 


What Is This Life Good For? 23 

If any man abandons the scene of action and thinks 
that he has found in passivity the end of life, he is 
deceived. He has not found the true end; he is a 
deserter. That is why in the judgment books of earth 
a severer verdict is passed upon those who stand aside 
than upon those who make many blunders and com¬ 
mit many sins, but do take part in the conflict. The 
wrath of all true servants of God is reserved chiefly 
for those who are spectators. When, in one of the 
oldest of songs, we read how Deborah called the Israel¬ 
ites to battle, we see that her curse rested upon the 
men of Meroz “ because they came not to the help of 
the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty/' 
They came not; they tarried at home; they won the 
reproach which always rests upon Meroz, the land 
where men rest when others are fighting. 

Once more, man is a seeker; that is not a part which 
he can take up and lay down as he pleases and still 
be a man — it is a distinctive mark of his manhood; 
it is the very definition of his character. 

What is man? In natural history man takes his 
place among the other creatures of this earth. He 
indeed shares much with those which we call sub¬ 
human. The apes of the forest have some things in 
common with human beings. They can be taught to 
imitate their ways. Those who have seen a chimpanzee 
smoke a cigar, or eat at table, will easily understand 
what is shared with man by the other creatures which 
inhabit this earth. Like man, they have their foes to 
fight; they have their own kind to defend. But the 
apes are not seekers in the sense in which man is a 
seeker. They hunt, it is true, for food; they move 


24 You Can Find God 

to fresh forests when the food fails. They are in the 
midst of foes; they must watch. But they have no 
desire to move into the mists which hang like a shroud 
over an unknown sea; they do not know the pressure 
upon them of the mysterious universe; they are not as 
man is in his noblest representatives — prepared to 
stake all that he has upon the search for truth. Other 
creatures are not hungry for knowledge. 

It cannot be claimed, as we have seen, that all men 
have this hunger; or indeed that any man is always 
hungry after truth. But the quality is one which marks 
man, though it is neither universal nor perpetual. 
Where man is like the subhuman creatures he needs 
no special explanation; we can understand him there. 
It is where he differs that we begin to see what man 
is, and man only. 

When the first adventurer set out in his cockle¬ 
shell boat upon the seas, not knowing what was be¬ 
fore him, no doubt the others mocked at him and in 
their comfortable caves congratulated themselves upon 
their security. “ Poor fellow! ” they said. “ What a 
pity that he is not like other men! ” They piled up 
their fires, and shut out the storm, and were proud 
that they were normal men. They even said that 
there was something abnormal about the seeker. Yet, 
looking back to the beginnings of humanity we know 
that the mad sailor was the one of that company who 
came nearest to being a man. The others could be 
easily explained as variations of an animal stock. The 
seeker calls for some other name. 

To this day it is clear that of the children of men 
the majority are content to leave mysteries unexplored. 
What it is like on the roof of the world we are con- 


What Is This Life Good For? 25 

tent to let others tell us. What may be the sources 
of the great rivers we do not trouble to inquire. We 
fit ourselves into the world of things as we have re¬ 
ceived it. Explorers, travelers, scholars are for us the 
rare, unusual, odd men. We who are not putting our¬ 
selves out to seek a way into the unknown are the 
ordinary, sensible, normal men. Yet at the same time 
we cannot escape altogether from the suspicion that 
actually they may be the normal and we the odd peo¬ 
ple. It may be human to seek, and less than human 
to accept things as they are. We read the stories of 
Scott and Shackleton and Edward Wilson; by all 
standards of prudence these men were clearly mad or, 
as our familiar phrase puts it, "beside themselves/' 
But something in us prompts us to believe that in 
truth they are not beside themselves at all; they have 
come to themselves. They have arrived; it is we who 
have halted on the way. It is we others who are be¬ 
side ourselves. Such, then, is man the seeker. 

If we turn to the writings from which we learn 
the way of life, we discover to our amazement that 
man in this historic scene, when he has been most 
clearly man, has always been searching not only after 
knowledge, but also after God. He has sought since 
the days when Enoch walked with God and “ listened 
continually to the Voice." The men of whom this 
world was not worthy were not content to take things 
as they were and to limit themselves to the visible 
earth. They went out, not knowing whither they 
went, but sure that there was a City with foundations, 
and they must not rest till they found it. We catch 
sight in Ur of the Chaldees of a sheik, the head of a 
clan, rich in possessions. There was no reason but 


26 You Can Find God 

one why he should leave Ur of the Chaldees, but that 
one reason outweighed all others — prudence, com¬ 
mon sense, tradition, the love of peace. He was not 
driven by hunger or by any of the untamed forces of 
nature. There were many wandering caravans in that 
country, but his was not of that kind. He had heard 
a voice which he could not deny or disobey. He 
became a seeker because of that voice within him. The 
father of the men of faith in all ages went out not 
knowing whither he went, nor was Abraham strange 
and inhuman in so doing. 

This is always the story of man when he enters upon 
his distinctive life. He is a pilgrim setting out upon 
the road at whose end is “ the hope of the city of 
God.” 

Man has never ceased, and can never cease, from 
his search for the hidden secrets of his world. Edward 
Wilson put clearly the reason why this search must 
not cease, however great the price to be paid for it. 
Speaking of the Antarctic Expedition in which he took 
part, he said: “ As for its main object, the acquisition 
of knowledge pure and simple, surely God means us 
to find out all we can of his works, and to work out 
our own salvation, realizing that all things that have 
to do with our spiritual development are understood 
and clearly seen.” To read God's thoughts after him 
is the calling which comes to man; he disobeys it at his 
peril. 

The leaders in this search must deny themselves: 
they are poor; their lives are cut short; their days are 
spent in toil which brings little reward in their time 
save the joys of obedience and adventure and, it may 


What Is This Life Good For? 27 

be, of the vision which comes in some hour of achieve¬ 
ment. But these are the men who forever set the 
standard for others. It is written of another of the 
explorers of our time, who died upon Mount Everest: 
“ Mallory was burning with a kind of fire, an ardent 
spiritual soul, winding himself up to a passion of effort 
the higher he got." Such ardent impatient souls miss 
many treasures, but they win that for which this life 
is most worth living. 

But is this search for knowledge to be separated 
from that desire to know God of which the records 
of mankind are full? We can appeal, if we will, to 
those records. We can call as witnesses seekers after 
knowledge in every age. We shall never escape from 
the evidence that in all their seekings they have known 
themselves to be seeking for God. There are many 
sacred places to which man may go on pilgrimage. The 
earth is filled with witnesses to the past hopes and 
dreams of mankind. But whenever men bring to light 
the hidden dwelling places of their ancestors they find 
sacred buildings in which man impressed upon stone 
his aspirations after God. We never find man without 
aspiration in history. Losing aspiration, he would have 
ceased to be man. And these many aspirations are 
not left scattered and unrelated; they are fulfilled in 
one paramount desire. What man has won on each 
level of life is carried over to the level on which, with 
all his treasures of wisdom and knowledge, he seeks 
the Lord. 

Sometimes in certain ages it looks as if the old de¬ 
sire had died down; but suddenly, without warning, 
it flames up again, and the fierce cry arises to God 


28 You Can Find God 

from some quiet and sensitive soul: “ I must have 
thee ”; and the things which had grown old become 
new. 

It is in such a world that our story must be written. 
This is the character of our race, where it has been 
graven deep in its annals. We belong to a race whose 
seekers have always been on the track of God. 

We shall be wise to accept this fact. We have no 
other course. The familiar story of Carlyle is not with¬ 
out its bearing upon this matter. Someone explained 
to him one day that Margaret Fuller “ accepted the 
universe.” “ Gad! she'd better! ” Carlyle replied. 
We had better adjust ourselves to the world as it 
comes to us, and not dream idly of another world in 
which we might have followed another way of life. 
If we accept the character of human life as it is given 
to us for a scene of conflict and pilgrimage, we shall 
not seek for the peace which eternity may bring to us; 
we shall live now as the dwellers in this mansion — 
no peaceful mansion — of the Father's house, and try 
with all diligence to win the good gift which can be 
won here. We must enter with full knowledge of 
what is involved into the ranks of the seekers. “ We 
accept our calling to seek the Lord, if haply we may 
feel after him and find him.” 

It is not always a question whether a thing in itself 
is good or evil. Often the decisions we must make are 
decisions between the good which is fitting to our 
present life and some other good. 

No complete analogy can be found, but one of 
partial significance may be used. A certain man after 
saving for years was able to spend a holiday in a Swiss 
village. It was spring. The fields were decked with 


What Is This Life Good For? 29 

flowers. The snows were white “ so as no fuller on 
earth can white them.” Cataracts leaped down every 
hillside. The land lay smiling in the sunshine and 
frowning in the storm. But this man settled down 
in his hotel. He read books; he played chess; he put 
records on the phonograph — all excellent activities in 
themselves. But the days passed by, and he never saw 
the light of the morning on those hills, or the blue 
of the lake, or the embroidery of the flowers. He went 
home again, but he had not seen Switzerland. He 
had not found the thing for which that place was 
good. 

One would think that no man could be so incredibly 
stupid as this. But in the concerns of this earthly 
life men constantly, blindly, are doing this very 
thing. They miss the distinctive character of this life. 
They may be busy about things not in the least evil, 
but they will go out of this life without the treasure 
which it was meant to give to them. They may win 
many gains, but not the one thing this earth could 
give to them. 

It may be that God could have ordered our life 
for us so that we might have him without seeking. 
But certainly this he has not done, and we should 
not waste our time in dwelling upon such speculations. 
He might have ordained for us a settled life; he has 
called us to be pilgrims. He might have given us peace; 
he gives us war, and war to the end. Having done all, 
we are to stand ready for the next battle. 

We have now to accept life as he gives it to us. 
We are pilgrims and we must now live as pilgrims. 
We are soldiers and we must not lay aside our arms. 


3° 


You Can Find God 


“ If this for me is thy command, 

To serve within a threaten'd land, 

Where every day a conflict brings 
To outposts of the King of kings, 

“ Then, Lord of Hosts, my glory lies 
In restless watch of sleepless eyes, 

In heart that leaps to join the fight 
At dawn or noon or black midnight.” 

“ The night cometh when no man can work.” Life 
is as one long day. This day must end, and when it 
ends it is not reborn. Another day may dawn, but in 
that day other work will be found for us. The work 
of the today must be done punctually. In the business 
of life there is no working overtime. 

In eternity, it is sometimes said, there will be no 
battles to wage, no wrongs to right; the soldier will be 
delivered from his campaigning and the pilgrim will 
be home. 

That may be. But what follows if this is so? If 
there is anything to be won in this day, surely it must 
be won now. If the adventure and the discipline, 
the sorrow and the joy of the pilgrim are to be ours, 
they must be ours now. The night cometh. . . . 


Ill 


ALONG WHAT ROADS ? 


I want you, just because you long for religion, to 
continue to cultivate, to cultivate more carefully 
and lovingly also, the interests, the activities, that 
are not directly religious. And this, not simply be¬ 
cause, “ Why, of course, we must eat our dinner; 
of course, we must have our little relaxations but 
much more because without these not directly 
religious interests and activities you —however 
slowly and unperceivedly — lose the material for 
grace to work in and on.* 

IF IT is granted that man is a seeker, and so long as 
he does not seek he falls below his proper life; and if 
all his seekings are gathered up in one — the search for 
God — what roads are open to him? From the place 
where he is now, what ways branch out for him to 
take? There may be more than one. 

We have always to guard ourselves against consider¬ 
ing plans or journeys as alternatives when they are not. 
There is no need to say at the outset “ either . . . 
or ”; we may have both. It is true that we shall come 
to crossroads at which we shall be challenged to make 
a choice; but too often we are tempted to say, when 
there is no necessity, “ I choose this and not that 

* Baron von Hiigel, Letters to a Niece (J. M. Dent and Sons, 
Ltd.), p. 62. 

31 




32 You Can Find God 

to take one or the other when we might have both. 

We may begin with the truth that man's life has 
more levels than one. There is no reason at the outset 
to say that we can find God only on one level. We 
may look for him on each level, though not in the 
same way. Man has a physical life in which he must 
ask, seek and knock, or he will perish. He has an in¬ 
tellectual life in which he uses his physical powers 
in the quest of knowledge. Walter de la Mare writes 
in his poem, “ Miss T.”: 

“ It's a very odd thing — 

As odd as can be — 

That whatever Miss T. eats 
Turns into Miss T.; 

Porridge and apples. 

Mince, muffins and mutton, 

Jam, junket, jumbles — 

Not a rap, not a button 
It matters; the moment 
They're out of her plate, 

Though shared by Miss Butcher 
And sour Mr. Bate; 

Tiny and cheerful 
And neat as can be, 

Whatever Miss T. eats 
Turns into Miss T." * 

That is the life which Miss T. lives on one level, 
and the poem gives us the precise truth concerning it. 
We must not be ashamed in the least of this level. 
Whatever Shakespeare ate turned into Shakespeare the 

# Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie (Constable). 


Along What Roads? 33 

poet, who interpreted the way of life in all its wind¬ 
ings and sounded all the deep places of the spirit of 
man. For him dinner was no humiliating concession 
but a delightful necessity. 

No less is it true that whatever St. Francis ate turned 
into St. Francis. The necessary and often wearisome 
search for food and clothing is a condition without 
which other searches cannot begin. The physical level 
finds its meaning not in itself, but in other levels. By 
itself it is incomplete. The man who seeks for noth¬ 
ing but to carry on his physical life misses the mean¬ 
ing of even that life. He is what is called a splendid 
animal, and that means a splendid failure. The animal 
becomes splendid only when he uses his animal nature 
in the service of that which is more than animal. 

Even in a perfectly ordered human life man would 
not be set free from all concern for his body. He 
would still keep in touch with mother earth. But 
a question of importance comes before us here: for 
very many of us the struggle is too largely on this 
plane of physical effort, and little energy is left when 
a lull comes in the battle. Life is for many of us a pro¬ 
longed and often losing battle for bread and butter. 
But suppose for a moment that there were no longer 
any need for such a desperate fight; what then? If 
we were free from any necessity to use our physical 
powers as we now have to do, what would happen to 
us? What does happen to those who in our modern 
life are further and further removed from the earth? 
Something certainly goes out of their life; and no in¬ 
tellectual or spiritual interests can make up for this 
loss. Indeed, on these other levels man, as a spiritual 
being, is impoverished if he is cut away from his base. 


34 You Can Find God 

In considering religion it is a fatal error to forget the 
body. 

There are in the Pacific sunny islands where it 
used not to be necessary for men to struggle to win 
their daily food. Nature was not a miserly stepmother 
to them, but a doting mother. Did that condition 
lead to a rich development of other powers? All the 
evidence is to the contrary. It may well be that the 
cessation of struggle on the physical plane might for 
us, as for them, lead to deterioration. That is why 
they are wise who think much of leisure and of the 
preparation of man for the leisure which may be his 
in some coming age. This is in reality a preparation 
for him of interests and conflicts on another level to 
which the struggle may be transferred. What would 
be fatal to man would be the total cessation of conflict. 

We may move from the physical to the intellectual 
level, but the new search there might be limited to the 
mysteries of this visible universe. “ In nature's in¬ 
finite book of secrecy " we might learn to read a little. 
The poets of the Elizabethan era were overwhelmed 
with wonder when they thought of the many mys¬ 
teries of the universe that awaited discovery, and of 
man, who was called by something within him to 
enter boldly into that unknown land. They had heard 
from that land a voice which could be interpreted by 
man; they had seen a path into that land, a path which 
the soul of man might take. 

“ Our souls whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world, 

And measure every wand'ring planet's course, 

Still striving after knowledge infinite, 

And always moving as the restless spheres." 


Along What Roads? 35 

So sang Marlowe, who was deemed by his contempo¬ 
raries a skeptic in religion. But for Marlowe, whatever 
his religion might have been, it was a certainty that 
between the spirit of man and this universe there was 
an understanding to be sought and found. The spirit 
of man might seek for the meaning of this universe 
in which it was set. Man must seek. 

Long ago in the book of Job the two levels were 
described in poetry which still captures the mind of 
every reader. The triumphs of man, the miner, by his 
physical prowess are sung: “ He setteth an end to dark¬ 
ness and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of 
darkness and the shadow of death/' 

But there is another level made known to man by 
the divine wisdom. There is another way which is hid 
from the eyes of all living and kept closed from the 
birds of the air. To that way, the way of wisdom, 
man is called — the same man who wins his bread from 
the earth and takes iron out of the earth. It is his 
glory that, sharing this earth with the fowls of the air, 
he can find a way which the vulture's eye hath not 
seen. For, to seek wisdom is man's true end; until 
he takes that other way which God understandeth, 
and enters into this other secret, hidden from all other 
creatures, he is not man at all. 

Man in quest of knowledge is man giving expres¬ 
sion to that vision which is given to him. He is the 
artist who seeks to express in stone or on canvas the 
thoughts of his heart. The artist, too, is a witness to 
the unquenchable spirit of man. Why did he ages 
ago sharpen stone and carve on the walls of his cave 
the things which he had seen? There was nothing in 
such drawings that could benefit his physical life. He 


36 You Can Find God 

did not hunt any more swiftly or strike his prey more 
surely because he had drawn upon his screen the beasts 
by which he was surrounded. There may have been a 
trace of magic in his activity, but magic does not ex¬ 
plain him. 

Man the artist takes his material and upon it im¬ 
presses his thought. He is not satisfied till he has told 
in all the ways open to him what is dawning upon 
him in the hidden and unfathomable reaches of his 
mind. The artist is also a seeker along ways which 
the vulture's eye hath not seen. Man the artist lifts 
the search of man the child of earth to another level. 
Here is the stone, hewn by the art and device of man 
from the earth; here is man, fed by the food which he 
has won from the earth, and man the thinker, with 
food which others knew not of. Out of these in¬ 
gredients man creates art. 

The world is full of monuments out of the past 
which tell how far man has traveled in the world in¬ 
visible. Everywhere he leaves upon the earth the con¬ 
fessions not of his kinship with the other creatures of 
the earth, but of his aspiration after knowledge and 
of his visions of beauty which they do not know. He 
is the thinker and the artist. We do not say when we 
see monuments which man has left to the ages, “ How 
clever his hands were! ” We say, “ Into what hidden 
worlds he had entered! ” 

Yet in every land and in every age he has never been 
able to rest content with any of his many achieve¬ 
ments. He is always a being conscious that he be¬ 
longs to another world. Almost before he knows it 
he finds himself on the track of Another in whose 
hands is his breath and whose are all his ways. He is 


A long What Roads? 37 

always seen, when he is most himself, to be on the track 
of God. 

Here it is not only helpful, it is essential, that we 
consider the Bible. If nothing more is granted at the 
outset, it is agreed that anyone who studies man on 
the track of God must read the Bible. Simplicity and 
fearless realism are found in it. Man is never treated 
there as a creature imprisoned in his physical life; he 
is always man the child of earth. When he is de¬ 
scribed in his search for God it is in nature, in history, 
in Christ the crucified and risen Lord, that he seeks, 
but he is never lifted out of nature. 

Nowhere is there a more frank acceptance than in 
the Bible of the fact that human life has many levels. 
We are never far from nature there, and from nature 
not in the least robbed of its terrors. Indeed for some 
readers the very realism is a stumbling block. Those 
who like to ignore what they call the lower elements 
in man's life and are tired of what was called by the 
Stoic “ the weary bondage to the flesh," may be of¬ 
fended by the frankness of these ancient books. A 
spade is called a spade. Man is treated not as spirit 
but as man. But in the present day there is less likeli¬ 
hood of such offense. We have returned, happily, to 
a healthier state of mind. We are not ashamed of 
Brother Ass the body, and we do not imagine that the 
God of the living has no concern for man except as a 
soul, nor that he begins to take notice of him only 
when he becomes “ religious." 

The writers of the Old Testament are never up¬ 
rooted from mother earth. They always have their 
ear to the ground, listening to its voices; they never 


38 You Can Find God 

lose their wonder and terror in the presence of nature. 
We do not forget that we belong to this visible earth, 
and, being its children, are driven to discover all that 
can be known of its secrets. 

In the Bible we read for the most part of a people 
busy upon their farms, directly dependent upon their 
herds and their crops, watching the sun making his 
journey “ coming out as a bridegroom from his cham¬ 
ber and rejoicing as a strong man to run a race.” They 
dreaded the havoc of the storm; they welcomed the 
rains which came down on the mown grass. They 
learned to trace Orion and the Pleiades in the mid¬ 
night sky. They studied the plants of the earth from 
which they received herbs of healing as well as kindly 
fruits. They had but little of the science which we 
have mastered, but they had the heart of the scholars 
who read God's thoughts after him. 

In their searching they did not separate nature from 
God as though there were no relation between the 
natural and the spiritual levels of life. The tempta¬ 
tion of the common people in Israel was rather to con¬ 
sider themselves one with nature. They were indeed 
tempted to go the common way of all Syrian religions 
and to take for their gods the processes of nature, 
exalting them to divine honor. That was the way 
along which Ahab, and Jezebel who made Ahab to sin, 
and the priests of Baal would have led Israel. It was 
the one alluring alternative which drew them away 
from the God who had redeemed them out of Egypt. 
They were tempted to sink to that lower level in their 
search for God, to go with all the tribes of Canaan, 
which held that the processes of nature were the chief 
clues to knowledge of the Most High. This meant at 


Along What Roads? 39 

best a pantheism in which all was God, at worst a 
deification of lust. It was not for nothing that the 
prophets fought to the death against the worship of 
the Baalim. 

When they turned from the worship of Astarte, the 
queen of heaven, and came back to the living and holy 
God, they did not forget that they were children of 
this earth and that their God was the Maker of heaven 
and earth. He was the Holy God, but he was still 
Lord of the World. Their songs of praise to him were 
filled with the symbols and parables of earth and sea 
and sky. To this day we sing their words: “The 
heavens declare the glory of God/' 

To the seers of Israel this was God's world. They 
sought to know what it was like; and in all their dis¬ 
coveries they knew that they were on the track of 
something still more wonderful, beyond their utmost 
knowledge. 

But in their search into nature they found them¬ 
selves strangely held and fettered; they were in the 
presence of dark powers by which they were bound 
and held down. The realm of nature was not only a 
gracious world in which signals were flashed from the 
eternal Lord; it was also a scene haunted by dark pow¬ 
ers with which man had to contend. Man was fettered 
in the world of nature. He was not free from terrors; 
nor did he discover, as he looked at things as they 
were, that nature was altogether kind or just. He was 
often tempted to think that the Power behind all 
things was unfriendly, or perhaps indifferent. 

There is a needful warning in the Scriptures to those 
who talk in a romantic language about nature and de¬ 
clare that all that we need to know of God may be dis- 


You Can Find God 


40 

covered on her level. If all that can be known of God 
may be seen in the processes of nature, then the verdict 
of our minds upon his character must be uncertain. 
Israel knew this; and she was guarded by the prophets 
from the temptation, so strongly entrenched in eastern 
religions, to deify nature. The prophets looked for 
God on the level of their physical life, but not for all 
that could be known of him. 

And if in our search we discover that there are forces 
in nature which must be fought by man, and this reali¬ 
zation troubles us, we can remind ourselves that these 
children of the ancient world of whom we read knew 
this fear also; they, too, understood what it meant to 
be ambushed by dark powers. As children of the 
earth they needed a deliverer. 

But in that level of life, with all its terrors and joys, 
the seers of Israel found the way, as we must find it, 
to that other level in which they listened to the divine 
voice and felt the pressure of the divine hand. They 
were not only children of mother earth; they were 
lifted to the level on which they knew themselves to 
be the children of God. “ Whom have I in heaven 
but Thee? And there is none upon earth I desire be¬ 
side Thee.” This was their cry. Beginning in the 
realm of nature, they were lifted above all that they 
could be in themselves into the realm of the spirit. 

It is unlikely that our experiences will duplicate 
theirs in detail. But we may discover that for us too 
there are the same levels upon which we may look for 
God, and these levels are for us, as for them, not 
separated, nor are they complete without one another. 
We too must live as children of this earth, and in so 
living discover that we are children of eternity. 


Along What Roads? 41 

If we think of the house of life as a house with 
stories — a useful but clearly incomplete picture — we 
must not think of the stories as composed of different 
apartments without communication with one another. 
The attempt to run the departments of life as though 
each were completely detached from the others only 
ends in disaster. The man who forgets Brother Ass 
is inviting trouble for himself. Brother Ass is not such 
a fool after all. He has his revenge. And the man 
who, on the other hand, ignores the spirit lives in a 
process which has no end and is meaningless. He is a 
character in a tale which is broken off; his life is 
doomed to futility. 

To illustrate these levels of life we can picture to 
ourselves an ancient church on a Sunday morning. 
We come from the countryside in the summer weather 
and within the cool shadows of the church we meet 
for worship with the village folk. 

A swallow flies through the window and flutters 
above the altar.* In it there is life. Like all other 
creatures it is sensitive to stimulus. It moves; it may 
even be said to love and to rejoice. But if it sings 
praises in the church they are unconscious praises; 
it brings its offerings unknowingly. It seeks God as 
birds seek the south when autumn comes. The psalm¬ 
ist said that in the temple the sparrow had found her 
a house, and the swallow a nest where she might lay 
her young. In his joyful song the singer acknowledges 
that there is a relation between the life of the birds 
and the worship of the house of God. 

In a very real sense the life of the swallow is linked 

* Evelyn Underhill has written a beautiful poem on such a 
theme. 


42 You Can Find God 

to the life of man. Man and bird are alike creatures 
who live for the glory of God. Man too is a creature 
of the earth; dust he is and to dust he returns. He 
should not forget his humbler kindred. Nor in his 
worship must he forget that other creatures are prais¬ 
ing God with him. 

There is something profoundly true in the story of 
St. Francis preaching to the birds. It is a prophecy 
of the final unity of all creatures in God. The pictures 
in which artists show the ox and the ass by the manger 
at Bethlehem are no less true; they show the life of 
the incarnate Lord as it is revealed to sentient beings 
and in them. Created beings are bringing their wor¬ 
ship, all unconscious as it may be, to the Word In¬ 
carnate. Man is their priest; this man is the high 
priest of all life, for he himself has taken flesh and 
blood. We may look for God on that earthly level. 

But in that same church there are evidences of an¬ 
other level of life. The building tells how man the 
maker has been able to impress his mind upon material 
things. The bird builds its nest, but man has taken 
the stones of the earth and fashioned them into a 
sanctuary with a beauty of its own and a grace which 
make it a fitting world from man to the unseen world 
in the heart of which the earth is set. Man is an artist 
as other creatures are not. He lives in his art. He 
has made the very stones to speak. He has taken reeds 
and strings and made music. He has written and 
printed books. He has made glass catch and temper 
the light of the sun. With his brush and his pigments 
he has recaptured stories out of a remote age. Man 
lives, but not as the swallow lives. He has arrived 
at another level. He has taken hold of the material 


Along What Roads? 43 

provided for him by the senses and made it serve his 
ends as a thinker and a maker. What is it, then, that 
distinguishes him from the other creatures? It is his 
conscious vision and his power to give it expression. 
He has taken a way which is hidden from other crea¬ 
tures. He may have arrived by almost imperceptible 
stages, but when he has arrived the difference is plain. 
On that level where man the artist works we can seek 
for God. 

On each of his levels he reflects God. Religious 
people are often in danger of shutting God out of what 
they call the lower levels of life. They think it un¬ 
worthy to look for God on these levels. They cannot 
believe that God can be revealed in beings who have 
no consciousness of him. They prefer to think of God 
as entering upon the scene only when mankind has 
reached the spiritual level and can speak with him as a 
friend. We find a certain satisfaction to our vanity 
when we suppose that God cannot be praised by any 
other creatures. We may come to despise our origin. 
We may refuse in our pride to look for God on each 
level where he is to be found. 

For us, if such is our mind, there is a rebuke in the 
close of the book of Jonah. Jonah had been disap¬ 
pointed with God for sparing Nineveh. He himself 
had prophesied that Nineveh would be destroyed, but 
that heathen city had repented and had been spared. 
Jonah was humiliated; he was jealous for his own repu¬ 
tation as a prophet. But he had always feared that 
God would not be firm enough with the heathen. 
Jonah spoke for the nationalism in Israel which looked 
upon heathen cities as fuel for the fire of divine venge¬ 
ance. But the Lord God teaches Jonah what 


44 You Can Find God 

Nineveh means to him — “ six score thousand persons 
which cannot distinguish their right hand from their 
left, and also much cattle.” God cares for all these 
creatures in Nineveh; none of them can be conscious 
of him, but in them too his life is reflected. In the 
little children and even in the cattle of Nineveh Jonah 
could have found God. 

We have no right to despise the life which all the 
animals share with us as though somehow our origin 
were something shameful which we ought to hide, and 
as though nothing of God's glory can be seen in any¬ 
thing lower than the spiritual. The Holy Scriptures 
do not teach us to think so. It is better to believe 
with the sacred writers that God has seen all these 
creatures and pronounced them good, and that in the 
life of the earth God “ tastes an ancient rapture.” It 
is better to be materialists, if by so being we can still 
believe that something of God is revealed in the earth 
and that his sacraments are there to be found, and if 
we see “ every common bush aflame with God.” 

Nor need man in his office as artist and maker be set 
outside the life of God. God is himself an artist. 
Where the life of the mind expresses itself in stone or 
color, where the craftsman takes hold of some material 
and seems to tear the secret out of it, chiseling and 
turning to his use the stones of the earth, there also is 
God Almighty, there we may seek for him, for there 
is life, and where life is, God is. This level also re¬ 
flects God's glory, and there he gives meaning to the 
lower level. Man who builds a church lifts with him 
to that level all the other created things. It is not all 
there is to be known of God that we find there, but 


Along What Roads? 45 

only on this level shall we enter into the knowledge of 
his character and purpose. 

Is that all there is to be found in that village church? 
The service begins; a new fact comes to light. Here 
is the spirit of man praying and in this way speaking 
to God. Man makes his answer to a voice which he 
believes has spoken to him. At the heart of this wor¬ 
ship he is recalling the ancient story of the crucified 
youth by whose hands redemption has been wrought. 
It is an ancient story which is still alive. That crucified 
Lord still lives, and in him man has reached another 
level of his spiritual life. He walks in the heavenly 
places with God. The same worshiper is at once an 
animal who eats and drinks, a craftsman who makes 
things, a thinker; and now he comes to the highest 
level of all, that for which all life was made: he is in 
Christ. 

It may be that for most of the worshipers that mys¬ 
terious life is touched only now and then. The air is 
too rarefied for them to breathe at all times. They do 
not hold fast what they touch at intervals. But they 
have touched it, and that is a prophecy of what will be. 

There are some, the called of God, who carry the 
intellectual gains of man to the level of the life of the 
spirit. The animal life — to use a rough description — 
is fulfilled in the intellectual, the intellectual in the life 
of the spirit. Man standing within eternity is the heir 
of God and the joint-heir of Christ. The creation in 
him is delivered out of the bondage of corruption into 
the glorious liberty of the children of God. All the 
levels of life are there, and all his seekings are fulfilled 
there. 


46 You Can Find God 

If this is the way of life, how in the experience of 
man does it stand related to the life of the Word In¬ 
carnate? Surely it is realized perfectly in that one life 
which we, who have received life from Him, realize 
in a small measure. 

In Christ was life. He it is who, by his life and 
death and his resurrection and his prolonged ministry 
through the Spirit, is set in the midst of our race as the 
revealer and the quickener of life. If we return to 
the church building he is there in the midst of his 
people, the source and sustainer of their life. Man 
in nature, man in history, man in Christ — there are 
levels of life, but all are fulfilled in the living Christ. 

It comes to this. We must seek for God. But we 
need not limit our field to what is known as spiritual. 
The Christian is of all men the one permitted to be 
the frankest materialist. Matter to him is not outside 
the life of God. This world is no foreign land from 
which the exile longs to return home. It is in one 
sense a battlefield where he must win his soul, in an¬ 
other a mansion of God's house, in which indeed there 
are many mansions. 

What ways, then, are opened to the seeker? 

There are many ways leading into the city of man's 
soul. Down each of them we may go in search of God. 
Down each of them we may look for his coming. But 
not in all his grace and truth can he be seen, except 
in the Word Incarnate. “ God who at sundry times 
and in divers manners spake in time past unto the 
fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken 
unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of 
all things, by whom also he made the world." 


Hllllllllllllllllll 


IV 

SEEKING GOD IN CHURCH 


“ IT IS about time/' said Tom,“ that we held a com¬ 
mittee meeting of the tennis club. It won't be easy to 
find a time.” 

“ I suggest,” said Dick, “ that we meet on Sunday 
morning at n a.m.” 

“ That will suit me,” said Harry, Jim and Joe. 

“ I'm sorry,” said Bob, “ that I can't manage it. I 
am going to church.” 

A silence followed. 

“ I am not quite sure that I caught that,” said Tom. 
“ It almost sounded as if he said that he was going to 
church.” 

“ Do people do such things still? ” asked Dick. 

“ They say,” said Harry, “ that you can hear some 
good music in church.” 

“ I went myself once a long time ago,” said Jim, 
who was twenty-one years of age, “ but I'm afraid it 
was for reasons not directly connected with the sacred¬ 
ness of the occasion.” 

“ It might relieve our anxieties,” said Tom, “ if this 
odd though far from useless member of the club would 
explain why he goes to church.” 

“ I go to look for God,” answered Bob. 

Another silence. 

“ Perhaps sometime,” said Tom, “ you might tell 

* 47 




48 You Can Find God 

us why you go there to seek for God, and what you find 
there/' 

We are thinking of ways at hand in which we can 
look for God. If we were told of a sacred temple in 
the east, or of some shrine in the west, we might con¬ 
sider the journey. But what if a few yards away there 
is a place in which we may look for God? Why should 
we not go to church in search of him? 

There must be no hiding the facts when we con¬ 
sider the church as it is found today. It is under fire, 
and in many things it deserves to be under fire. The 
charges leveled against it must not make the church¬ 
man angry; they are often exaggerated, prejudiced, igno¬ 
rant; but it is more important to discover the measure 
of truth in them than to score points against the 
critics. Certainly the defender of the church cannot 
speak to this generation without shame and penitence. 
He should know better than the critics where it has 
failed. Within its own borders the church should be 
its own relentless critic. 

Some years ago a pageant was written by Laurence 
Housman for St. Martin's-in-th e-Fields. It presented 
in a series of historical episodes the story of the church 
since the day when St. Martin divided his cloak with 
the beggar. It was not the glorious scenes only that 
were shown. The shame of the church was not hid¬ 
den, but openly confessed. The last scene was placed 
in Hyde Park. A communist orator was denouncing 
in scornful words the failure of the church to witness 
to the spirit of brotherhood. The final word was with 
the witness, who throughout the pageant commented 
on the scenes. This was not a word of anger or bitter 


Seeking God in Church 49 

denial, but rather the answer of a society which knows 
and confesses with shame its sins against its calling. 
What had been said by its critic was unjust and un¬ 
balanced; but how far was it true? 

Let it be admitted that as likely as not the church 
to which we go in search of God will be very human 
in its imperfections. We must not go in search of a 
perfect church, but we can keep before us the things 
which are essential. 

Almost the first condition for those who seek in the 
church for God is that they lay aside their fastidious¬ 
ness. Good people often mistake refinement for holi¬ 
ness. They do not like “ common people/' and by 
that they mean people whose manners and appearance 
are displeasing to them. They almost take it for 
granted that in the kingdom of heaven there will be 
room only for nice people. They may even be heard 
to commend their own local church on the ground that 
there are very nice people there. 

Nothing can be clearer from the records of the gos¬ 
pel than that our Lord did not associate with nice 
people only. He was accused of being a friend of 
publicans and sinners, and at one time it looked as if 
he had a special mission to publicans. No one who 
lived in Corinth ever supposed that the followers of 
the Way were nice people. Some were, and gave them¬ 
selves airs about it, but others were mean and con¬ 
temptible in the eyes of the Corinthians. They were, 
as St. Paul admitted, nobodies. 

Those who seek for God must not be superior in 
their judgments or think that they are on a level above 
that on which these ordinary people move. There was 
no more learned scholar of our time than Baron von 


You Can Find God 

Hiigel. In one of his books he uses an illustration 
from the saintly life of a poor woman with whom he 
had the honor of being a fellow worshiper in a Mid¬ 
land church. The reference in the index, filled as it 
is with names of learned men, is significant: “ Washer¬ 
woman, the, p. — ” In that humble life what did the 
scholar find? He would not have hesitated to say that 
he found God. 

And why should we be so superior? What are we 
but human beings, born of the same family as the 
others — sharing in a common human inheritance of 
sin and failure, of sorrow and sickness and pain, of 
love that quickens and wounds; heirs of a common life 
moving swiftly to the universal experience of death? 

In a letter to his niece this same profound thinker 
gave some wise counsel. His niece had written to 
him of the dullness of the country church services. 
He replied: 

The touching, entrancing beauty of Christian¬ 
ity, my niece, depends upon a subtle something 
which all this fastidiousness ignores. Its great¬ 
ness, its special genius, consists, as much as in 
anything else, in that it is without this fastidious¬ 
ness. A soul that is, I do not say tempted, but 
dominated, by such fastidiousness, is as yet only 
hovering round the precincts of Christianity, but 
it has not entered its sanctuary, where heroism 
is always homely, where the best always acts as 
a stimulus toward helping toward being (in a 
true sense) but one of the semi-articulate, bo¬ 
vine, childish, repulsively second-third-fourth-rate 
crowd. . . . It is, really, a very hideous thing; the 


Seeking God in Church 51 

full, truly free beauty of Christ alone completely 

liberates us from this miserable bondage. 

If we make the condition that we shall go to church 
on the understanding that we shall find only educated, 
refined, pleasant people, we shall enter it in vain. We 
have no business to seek those only; and if we did we 
should not find them. The people we shall find in 
church will be of all ages and of all sorts and condi¬ 
tions. Some will be tired, holding on to their church- 
manship only out of habit. Some will be quick, others 
slow in their understanding. Some will be pleasant 
and interesting, others, as we say at first sight, stuffy 
and dull. They will have sharp differences and per¬ 
haps quarrels. The preacher may or may not be a 
master of the art, the perilous art, of preaching. The 
choir may be good or bad. A good choir may sing 
bad music, and a bad choir may murder good music. 
And the societies which are at work within the larger 
compass of the church may also be of all kinds — 
some with little attraction for the mind of youth, some 
merely survivals of a day of enthusiasm long ended, 
some that have been a long time in dying. At least it 
will not be denied that a visitor to the many churches 
which are found in the cities and villages of any coun¬ 
try will find some which do not offer a promising way 
for the seeker after God. 

But no society ought to be judged in the sweeping 
way in which the church is judged. Almost everybody 
seems to think himself qualified to pronounce a sweep¬ 
ing judgment on this society. Generalizations are 
hastily made on the basis of a very small experience. 
It is not hard to find men who have done with the 


You Can Find God 


5 2 

church because of some slight which they met with 
years ago in their local church. It is almost a daily 
experience to hear men speak of what the church 
teaches, what mistakes the church has made, how the 
church ought to mend its ways. 

Now the church should not be condemned by any¬ 
one who has not made some attempt to discover what 
it stands for when it is true to its own calling. Before 
it is condemned it might be in order to inquire what 
our life would be like without the church even as it 
is today. 

In his pageant “ The Rock/' * T. S. Eliot set him¬ 
self to defend those who in our modern cities build 
temples for the worship of God and in them bear 
witness before men to the Light Invisible. He de¬ 
scribes the life of a modern suburb: 

“ A cry from the north, from the west and from the 

SOUTH 

Whence thousands travel daily to the time kept 
city: 

Where My Word is unspoken. 

In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels 

The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit. 

The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court, 

And the wind shall say: * Here were decent godless 
people: 

Their only monument the asphalt road 

And a thousand lost golf-balls/ ” 

If we think of such a land, and then in our imagina¬ 
tion try to understand what a house of God would 

* In Collected Poems (Faber and Faber). 


Seeking God in Church 53 

mean there, we shall not be so swift to condemn the 
very imperfect societies which do at least keep before 
the eyes of men the light of God, and do offer to 
them the Word and the sacraments by which alone 
human life can be raised to its true glory. They may 
do this most faultily, but they are the only societies 
that do it at all. 

At least there is a church to be explored by us. We 
shall be foolish if in our search for God we neglect a 
society which by its history and in its worship does 
exist for this very thing, to perpetuate and to offer to 
mankind a way to God. Therefore it must be said in 
all frankness to those who are seeking God that they 
must not pass by the door of the church on the 
ground that it is the home of a motley crowd of people 
who fall far short of their calling. 

Nor is it fair to claim that if the Lord of the church 
were there, and not these his poor followers, we should 
be ready to enter those sacred buildings. Should we? 
Are we sure that we are ready to face his judgment? 
Would he be so easy with us? Would he meet us in 
a reasonable way? 

It is conceivable too that he may be there even now. 
Others in an hour like that through which we are 
passing have found in the sanctuary a way that was a 
right way and that led them to God, not a track that 
was lost. 

There is a story of one such seeker in the Psalms. 
Some of these hymns, which were arranged for the 
second temple, carry within them records of personal 
adventures and hairbreadth escapes. This particular 
story is so fitted to our own spiritual condition that 
it might have been written yesterday. 


You Can Find God 


54 

The seeker of the story had almost lost hope. “ As 
for me, my feet were well-nigh gone/' Like another 
poet in a later age he had almost yielded up all moral 
questions in despair. He could not make sense of this 
world, viewed as he had to view it as God's world. 
Everywhere evil was exalted, everywhere the good cast 
down; and where in all this scene was God? He could 
see no way out of the last fear of all — the fear that 
God did not take any interest in the affairs of man. 
That was always the dread which startled the Hebrew 
when he woke in the night. That is the last fear which 
chills us still. This seeker was more troubled about 
God than he was about man. How would the char¬ 
acter of God emerge in history? He went over the 
facts; he arranged them and rearranged them, he 
changed a little here and there; but the problem al¬ 
ways worked out to the same answer. Perhaps God 
did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not care. 
Either way the prospect was dark. 

Then he went into the sanctuary. He was desperate; 
in his search for an answer he went, as we should put 
it, to church. The temple for him was not unlike 
church as we know it. There were within its walls 
the same men and women we find today, subject to the 
same passions, weak, tempted, with minds distracted, 
sometimes fearing man more than they feared God. A 
fastidious saint could despise them as he can now, but 
not a desperate man. 

There in the temple would be symbols which told 
as much or as little as symbols tell us today of what 
God had done for his people and what his holy and 
eternal purpose was. Words which we still repeat 


Seeking God in Church 55 

were on the lips of men in that temple. They were 
words familiar in the daily life of men. How other¬ 
wise could any message from an unseen world come 
through to the human mind? Not in any strange 
tongue could God speak to man. 

It was as a desperate man that the singer went into 
the sanctuary. It was a last resort. Desperate men 
cannot be choosers. He expected little, but he was not 
the first nor the last to try this way. He went into 
the temple in one mind; he came out in another. 
What had come to him? It is not easy to put into 
exact language, but it was certainly the provision of 
new facts, and with them of a new point of view from 
which to look at the old facts. These new facts had 
everything to do with the sanctuary. They were 
not a set of arguments such as a lawyer might set 
forth as he opens a case. It was more a new level 
of thought and feeling to which he was lifted than a 
new statement of the evidence. But it made all the 
difference to him. He sought something that the 
new experience had given to him, something which 
was far beyond all the needs of the bitter hour through 
which he was passing. 

“ Nevertheless I am still with Thee. 

Thou hast holden me by my right hand; 

I am Thine/' 

He became very sure of God, and of a God who did 
not solve his problems but gave himself to his child. 
“ I am with thee." That was enough to make that 
sanctuary shine with an eternal radiance. The seeker 
did not find a defense of his theology; he found God. 


56 You Can Find God 

Let us leave that temple to take our place in a 
modern city, and think of such a man in these days 
going to church. 

His feet too have “ well-nigh slipped.” He reads 
in the papers of poor and feeble tribes robbed of their 
inheritance by grasping nations. He hears of those 
who grow rich by cruel measures and are proud; and 
“ their tongue walketh through the earth,” or, as we 
might say, their words have an international impor¬ 
tance on all the bourses of the world. He is himself 
out of work and suffers from lack of food. He fought 
in the World War, but not having been numbered 
among the heroes who fell he is now not so much a 
hero as a nuisance. He watches the herds of men 
rushing or being driven like the swine of the Gadarenes 
down a steep place into the sea. And what does God 
care? 

Then he goes to church. He too goes as a desperate 
man clinging with a feeble hold to the faith of his child¬ 
hood. The church into which he goes is not in any 
way remarkable either for its beauty or its ritual. It 
is one of a thousand such churches. The worshipers 
within it are as motley a company as they were in the 
temple of old. The preacher is not an eloquent man 
nor a spiritual giant; he is one of tens of thousands of 
honest and hard-working ministers of the gospel who 
can be found in any country. The Sacred Book is 
read, hymns are sung, prayers are offered, the sermon 
is preached. Or it may be the holy communion is 
celebrated. Nothing but the customary traditional 
forms of worship. There are no signs of enthusiasm. 
It is not a time of revival, but one of the long periods 
between those hours. 


Seeking God in Church 57 

Yet in such a place something new is given to him. 
It is not that the preacher delivers a sermon on the 
problem of evil in the world or upon the wrongs which 
Christian people should challenge. It is certainly not 
because any new facts are brought before him. But 
none the less something is given to him which provides 
fresh hope for him. For it is the hope to be found 
in the church which impresses the visitor more than 
anything else. There are many words which speak of 
sorrow and the shadow of death. But the total im¬ 
pression is one not of gloom but of confidence and 
hope. In the world, it was promised, there would be 
tribulation, but there are said to be some who have 
overcome the world. The hope that this may be his 
experience is created by the working together of many 
forces. 

Such a visitor could not enter a church without 
remembering that its very existence is a startling fact. 
Here in the heart of a modern city is a building sacred 
to the memory of one Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish 
teacher whom some declared to be Son of God. He 
had died on the cross more than nineteen hundred 
years ago. So far as the greater number of those who 
had known him were concerned, he was last seen a 
dead man nailed to a cross in the company of two 
other dead men. Yet in a modern city in this present 
day there are still those who for some reason remem¬ 
ber this strange man. They do not think of him as a 
dead hero. Why should a dead hero be remembered 
as Christ is remembered in the holy communion, by 
the eating of bread and the drinking of wine? This 
young Prince of Glory, as one of their hymns calls 
him, was in some way a living Saviour whose name is 


You Can Find God 


5 8 

still precious. Still they are singing, “ Jesus, thou joy 
of loving hearts. . . Of what dead hero can this be 
said? 

Things which have become precious are not easily 
laid aside. Man has a pathetic desire to keep alive 
the great souls who have given themselves for their 
friends. But why should a number of modern men 
and women meet in the name of such a dead hero, 
read translations from ancient books about him, sing 
hymns of adoration to him and utter words which 
speak of their nourishment by his broken body and 
his blood which was shed? The presence of the church 
of Christ in modern society is a startling fact, not the 
less startling if it is noted how ordinary are the people 
within it. Only our familiarity with it blinds us to the 
miracle that is before our eyes in the very presence of 
this ancient society. 

But why should we seek the Redeemer among these 
ordinary men and women? This criticism is made 
everywhere. Sometimes it is joined to a request that 
we seek him in the church invisible. We need not be 
bound down to this poor imperfect society but, it is 
said, should rather seek our home in the perfected city 
of God. 

It is common to say that men do not believe in 
organized religion. This means, in other words, that 
we do not believe in the only church which we can 
hope to find. We are now living in a world of time 
and space. We have to do with particular things and 
persons. We do not shape our life by our relations 
with man, nor do we spend our days on some unde¬ 
fined and unsearchable region called earth. We live 


Seeking God in Church 59 

with certain individual human beings; we have a little 
piece of this earth on which we are at home. If our 
religion is to be of any service to us in such a life it 
must appeal to us not as though we were above or out 
of this scene and already in some invisible world; it 
must come to us as we are at this moment. If we were 
other than we are we might have a philosophy, but it 
is not philosophy we seek but God, and God cannot 
be known to us except as he becomes incarnate. 

But we cannot accept this faith without facing other 
inevitable conclusions. The Lord made flesh must live 
still in his body, and that body must be a human 
society. What is the church but the body of Christ? 
And it is not the less his body in that it consists of 
weak and faltering men and women still fighting against 
their temptations and often fighting a losing battle. 

Among such mortals if anywhere we must look for 
the living Christ. Not in the heavens above, but here. 
He is not to be separated from his body. And when 
we speak of Christian people as his body we mean 
not simply that they need his wisdom and love and 
power to throb through them, but also that he needs 
them; he is not to be separated from them. To despise 
the church of Christ and to set our whole affection 
on an invisible church of the saints in glory is to be 
disloyal to the Lord Christ. 

We must seek for God in his church on earth. 
There he has pledged himself to meet us. 


V 


CAN WE SEEK HIM IN THE DARKNESS ? 


Yea though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art 
with me. 

NO MAN can hope to find God if he deliberately 
blinds himself to the dark facts of this human scene 
and chooses to live only in the world of pleasant things, 
chatting of all that is disquieting as though it existed 
only in a tale. No man can come to walk in the light 
of God unless he is prepared in the service of truth 
to walk also in the darkness. It is not ours to choose 
the darkness; but if the way lies through it we must 
arise and go, or lose our souls. If God will have us to 
go by green pastures and still waters we shall accept 
his will. If he will lead us into the valley of the shadow 
of death thither also we must go. We must not decide 
beforehand by which discipline he shall prepare us for 
our place in his eternal kingdom. 

You can find God in the darkness. You can find 
also in the darkness a way to his kingdom. There 
may come an hour in which for the sake of his loyalty 
to truth a man has to enter into the darkness of doubt 
and even of complete unbelief. Such experiences 
have often come to men in times in which new dis¬ 
coveries were made — when, for example, Copernicus 
compelled men to look to the heavens with startled 

60 




Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 61 

eyes, or when Darwin made men think afresh on the 
problem of the origin of species. When such times 
come they “ test men's souls." Some have said in such 
hours, with the flippancy which may go with an out¬ 
ward piety, “ Let us hope it is not true, but if it is true 
let us hush it up." But others were not prepared to 
ignore the new hypotheses and the facts which were 
proved in support of them. On the one side there 
stretched the old familiar road with the familiar light, 
tender and sacred, resting upon it; on the other, a steep 
way leading down to the dark valley. They seemed 
to themselves to be saying farewell to their former 
faith and to be losing the light of their hope forever, 
but they had no other way. They knew that “ he who 
begins by loving Christianity better than truth will 
proceed by loving his own sect or church better than 
Christianity, and end in loving himself better than 
all." * This is literally true, though when the de¬ 
cisive choice is made the man does not know it. For 
the sake of truth, since he is compelled as its sworn 
soldier to obey its call, he may lose his faith; but 
though he suffer long, not by loyalty to truth will he 
lose the God who desires truth in the inward parts. 
There is a price to be paid in the revelation of truth to 
man, and that price may be the loss for a time of the 
vision of God. 

There never was an age in which so many were com¬ 
pelled to adjust their traditional belief to new facts as 
are so compelled today. Choices which in ancient 
times or in the Middle Ages had to be made by the 
few are now to be made by a large number. The 
dissemination to all of information through printing 
* S. T. Coleridge. 


You Can Find God 


62 

press and radio forces the average man to make de¬ 
cisions, the man who in other ages was left to carry on 
undisturbed the old traditions. It might have been 
fantastic in those times to warn such men that they 
might be called to enter into the region of twilight 
and perhaps of darkness. It is not fantastic today. 
Things which were once whispered are now shouted 
abroad. Boys in the sixth form or boys in a senior 
Sunday school are busy upon problems which were 
once considered out of their range. It is said that the 
undergraduate of today knows as much as did the 
graduate of some years ago. 

There are dangers here. Choices may have to be 
made upon a hasty or imperfect summary of the facts. 
It is easy for a fearless student to say that astronomy, 
geology, biology, history and now psychology have 
robbed the Christian church of one line of defense 
after another, and the honest man has now to start 
there — with the ground clear of the old religion. But 
no man does any service to truth by a reckless ac¬ 
ceptance of untested “ facts.” The loyal servant of 
the truth knows that he must be loyal in the search 
for truth as well as in the service of truth when he has 
found it. 

The story of Romanes, the famous biologist of the 
late Victorian era, is familiar to those who belonged 
in their youth to the same age. His name lives in the 
Romanes Lecture which is delivered annually in Ox¬ 
ford. 

The eclipse of faith came to him in the course of a 
steadfast following of truth; all who knew him counted 
him among the pure in heart to whom it is promised 
that they shall see God. “ He had always cared more 


Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 63 

for truth/' it was said of him, “ for the knowledge of 
God, than for anything else in the world." In the 
loyalty to truth which his study of science demanded, 
he lost his faith. He lived in the age in which Charles 
Darwin, his master and friend, by his Origin of Species 
brought to the knowledge of men certain new facts 
which no serious student could ignore. To many the 
new teaching threatened the very existence of theism. 
Some defenders of the faith did not help such scien¬ 
tific students as Romanes. With sad and reluctant 
backward glances he went into the darkness. He be¬ 
came an agnostic and for a time almost a materialist. 
He knew the price that he was paying. To him the 
loss of faith was no light matter. 

I am not ashamed to confess that with this 
virtual negation of God the universe to me has 
lost its soul of loveliness; and although from 
henceforth the precept to work “ while it is day ” 
will doubtless but gain an intensified force from 
the terribly intensified meaning of the words that 
“ the night cometh when no man can work," yet 
when at times I think, as think at times I must, 
of the appalling contrast between the hallowed 
glory of that creed which once was mine and the 
lonely mystery of existence as now I find it, at 
such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid 
the sharpest pang of which my nature is capable. 

These words were written while he was under the 
eclipse which he did not know to be only an eclipse. 

But he did not turn back; and in the darkness there 
came to him, not in a moment, but slowly and pain¬ 
fully, the certainty of the truth of the Christian faith. 


64 You Can Find God 

In 1878 he would have rejected as impossible any idea 
of a return to faith. When he died in 1894 he had 
come back to his faith and had defended it. His life 
in the years of eclipse was to all appearances one of 
happiness and even of mirth, but he never lost his 
sorrow and his longing. Always he was loyal to the 
facts as they came to him, and in particular to the 
stubborn facts, and through that loyalty, that “ en¬ 
durance of incompleteness/' he was led back to the 
faith which was his joy in youth: 

The sincerely scientific mind shows such tenac¬ 
ity as that under every trial of its faith and pa¬ 
tience, howsoever long and unpromising and un¬ 
relieved; for it knows itself responsible not for 
attainment, but for perseverance: not for con¬ 
quest but for loyalty.* 

In that patience he won his soul. 

In a poem written near the end of his life Romanes 
sang his nunc dimittis , in which he likened himself to 
one of the aliens militant sojourning on earth. These 
were his words to his Lord whom he had found again 
after many days: 

“ As thou hast found me ready to thy call, 

Which stationed me to watch the outer wall, 

And, quitting joys and hopes that once were mine, 
To pace with patient steps this narrow line, 

Oh! may it be that, coming soon or late, 

Thou still shalt find thy soldier at the gate 

* Ethel Romanes, The Life of Romanes (Longmans, Green 
and Co., Ltd.), p. 353. 


Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 65 

Who then will follow thee till sight needs not to 
prove, 

And faith will be dissolved to knowledge of thy love/' 

He came to know who had set him there; but even in 
the dark years when he did not know this he was still 
one of God's soldiers pacing that wall. God's soldiers! 
The soldier does not decide where his post must be. 

Yet it was in that darkness he found what he had 
lost, and found it a more wonderful and satisfying 
treasure than he had known it before. We can at least 
be certain that the man who came through that dark¬ 
ness because he had been loyal to truth and fearless 
in the search for it and because he had kept back none 
of the price demanded of him, was worthy to be called 
one of the sons of God. If he had turned back to the 
sunnier ways he might have escaped much sorrow, but 
would he have found what he did find? 

There is a suspicion abroad that men come to the 
dilemma where they must choose between God and 
truth, and that in blinding themselves to truth they 
may be winning favor with God. That this is blas¬ 
phemous everyone can see who gives it a moment's 
thought; that it is impossible we should see no less 
clearly. “ Things are what they are, and the conse¬ 
quences will be what they will be." 

But it is not always admitted that in the Bible it¬ 
self is the vindication of those who challenge the dark¬ 
ness and in time, it may be long or short, find their 
way to God. 

The choice may come at any time to the man who 
is thinking his way through the facts on which he is 


66 You Can Find God 

compelled to form his judgment of the meaning of 
things. He too in the presence of new data may have 
to rethink his inherited religion. He too may be driven 
out of its shelter down strange and haunted ways. 
Hardest fate of all, he may be condemned as a traitor 
to the faith which he never desired more than in the 
hour in which he lost it. But he may take comfort 
in the remembrance that the way of the Lord Christ 
was not prepared only by those who found God in the 
sunshine, but also by men of sorrows who in their 
loyalty to truth were prepared to enter into the shadow 
of death. 

The reader of the Bible, if he reads it in the right 
way, will find that the Lord who speaks to him there is 
not one whose chosen servants are expected to dis¬ 
semble or to hide from him their doubts and fear. 
They are encouraged to speak out their minds, “ to 
stand on their feet like men '' and hold converse with 
him. Those of them who use the language of re¬ 
proach or even despair are not reproached by their 
Lord; those who enter the darkness are not forgotten 
by him. 

If we think of this very “ endurance of incomplete¬ 
ness/' which was the secret of Romanes, we shall find 
that it is the secret of Job. In that story every man 
who has to enter the darkness that comes between the 
old interpretation of life, which has proved inadequate, 
and the new, which has not yet been found, can dis¬ 
cover himself. He is Job, and his problem is, in the 
heart of it, the same as Job's. Patience like that of 
the patriarch must be the readiness at all costs to be 
true to facts and to endure incompleteness. Such pa¬ 
tience has still the same reward. 


Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 67 

Job is the patriarch whose life, unknown to him, is 
of interest in the courts of heaven. But the prologue 
which deals with that heavenly scene is hidden from 
him. He is a man stripped of all things and tempted 
at the last to curse God and die. But the tragedy 
of his life lies less in the physical agonies than in the 
loss of the certainty of God which others knew. They 
believed in an order of justice, complete and undeviat¬ 
ing. He could no longer believe this, and he had noth¬ 
ing to put into its place. 

No book in the Old Testament makes a more in¬ 
stant appeal to men of our time, and no book deserves 
to be more carefully studied by those who are uprooted 
and homeless. The book is concerned with one man; 
it had, no doubt, its bearing upon the nation of Israel 
in its sorrows, but it is of Job the patriarch, “ ship¬ 
wrecked upon the will of God/' we have to think 
chiefly. 

God, it would appear, the only God of whom he 
had any knowledge, had failed him. What could he 
now do? Deny the facts as they had been brought 
home to him? Blindly affirm that the old tradition 
with which these facts were inconsistent was never¬ 
theless true? His friends pleaded with him in glorious 
poetry not to leave the old way. There at least, with 
all the uncertainties that lay upon them like clouds, 
there were gleams of light. The other way led to 
darkness. In the night man wanders with no land¬ 
marks. 

Few men can have passed through life without ask¬ 
ing the question which Job asked. What was the 
meaning of his sufferings? They were not penalty 
for sin on his part; Job throughout maintains that this 


68 You Can Find God 

explanation does not account for his sufferings. But 
what then did they mean? In language of sublime 
beauty and of fearless honesty Job describes his lot. 
But he is more concerned for the character of God 
than for any suffering which he has to bear. He 
dreads this above all things, that God should be in 
reality what he seems to be at that moment —a 
celestial giant making his sport with a human life. 

He has left the sunny places in which God's lamp 
shone about him. He has left also the twilight lands 
on which some dying gleams of that light could rest. 
He goes bravely into the valley of the shadow of 
death. He does not stop short of the last cry of faith, 
“ Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” 

In the end there was restored to him the vision of 
a God greater and more mysterious than any he had 
known in his happier days. If it was only in gleams 
he saw the promise of a restored hope, he did see it. 
Job had endured the intervening stage in which the 
old unquestioned belief is gone and the new has not 
yet come. But in that stage he had found peace — 
peace in the very mystery of God, so far beyond his 
grasp, so remote from him, and yet so near. He came 
to the place where all that a man can do is to bow in 
adoration at the feet of God. “ I had heard of Thee 
with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth 
Thee; wherefore I abhor myself in dust and ashes.” 

There are others in that ancient story who are called 
into the darkness, not by their own personal experi¬ 
ences but by the sorrows of their nation. They would 
gladly cling to a faith in the divine love, but they see 
a world in which God seems to do nothing. They 


Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 69 

cannot reconcile the world as they know it with a be¬ 
lief in the justice and mercy of the eternal God. They 
are compelled to cry out to him in their bitterness of 
spirit, “ O Lord, thou hast deceived me and I was de¬ 
ceived.” It was through one into whose soul this fear 
had entered deeply that, in the life of Israel, the high¬ 
way led to the cross. 

Jeremiah found the road of life narrowed down to 
a path, a strait way which led him into the valley of 
the shadow of death. If he had shared in his youth 
the hopes of the reformers among his people, he suf¬ 
fered the fate of all youthful reformers. He saw the 
store of enthusiasm running low. Reformations are 
always threatened not only by the resistance of old 
vested interests but also by the defects of our human 
nature, which soon grows weary and cannot hold to 
the level which it has won. Jeremiah had to face the 
closing of one way of hope after another. At last 
nothing was left but the road, with its darkening shad¬ 
ows, which leads into the valley of death. His nation 
must die and he must share its death; for exile to a true 
Israelite meant death. And Jerusalem itself must be 
left no longer the city of the great King, the virgin 
daughter of Zion, but a place of death. 

Yet Jeremiah, though he faltered, did not go back. 
He cried aloud against his call; he used language which 
on other lips would have seemed blasphemy; but when 
he was called he went. And in walking that way he 
began to see for himself, and for all men, what might 
be the divine meaning of suffering and death. In the 
thick darkness he saw a look on the face of God which 
cannot be seen in the light of day. The man of sor¬ 
rows looked, if it was only for a moment, upon the 


•70 You Can Find God 

face of a God who could give to a people despoiled, 
and even destroyed, a word which he could never have 
given to that same people in the proud days of David 
and Solomon. If today we believe that God is one 
who in all our sorrows has his share, we can trace the 
way of our faith back to the faith of Jeremiah. 

What can a reader of this age expect to learn from 
such a prophet? He can scarcely spare time, unless he 
is a scholar, for the history of Jerusalem. Apart from 
the great voices which we hear in Jerusalem its records 
can have a value only to specialists in one branch of 
ancient history. What will be asked by such a reader 
is this: There is much offered to us by men of the 
past who have claimed to be the hearers of some 
divine word. Clearly such a word can come to men 
only by ways difficult and almost inaccessible. There 
may be a divine face looking upon man, but how is 
he to see it? There may be a voice speaking, but who 
will teach him the language? Here, however, is one of 
those rare beings who, by virtue of his place in history 
and also by virtue of the surrender of himself and the 
denial of himself, is marked out to see the heavenly 
vision and to hear the voice. What, then, did he see? 
What fresh expression on that divine face? What 
words did he hear such as others had not heard? What 
words did he understand which others had failed to 
understand? 

These are things which a reader has a right to ask. 
And the answer comes that God did indeed speak to 
him, but God was able to speak to him because he had 
not turned back from the darkness. He accepted the 
dark lot of his people, and though this might mean the 
loss of all his early hopes and all the traditional be- 


Can We Seek Him in the Darkness? 71 

liefs of his nation, he accepted it in faith. If God 
would have him to be in the light, blessed be his name! 
If he would have him to be in the darkness, blessed 
also be his name! 

There is yet one other who went into the darkness 
and saw upon that hidden face a look which others 
had not seen. He lived in the exile by which Israel 
had been broken in fragments. But the doom rested 
not only upon the false and faithless members of the 
nation, but even more upon the few, the remnant, 
who had never lost their faith. Why did they suffer? 
Was there any reason which could bring hope to them? 
Or had God cast them off forever? 

In such an hour there was a prophet who entered 
for his people into the thick darkness where God was. 
In the solemn ritual of the temple the high priest 
entered for his people into the holy of holies. When 
he vanished behind the parted veil it was as if the 
whole congregation had gone with him. When this 
prophet dared in the secret of his soul to enter the 
darkness, he went as the representative of Israel, the 
new inner Israel, which now in the wreck of the old 
nation might be the instrument of God. For them 
he listened for the word of God. And what was that 
word but the revelation that Israel, broken, with all its 
earthly hopes shattered, with no earthly pride left, 
was called in its sorrow and suffering to bring heal¬ 
ing to the nations; wounded for their transgressions, 
bruised for their iniquities, it would give its life a 
ransom for many. 

We come here, as Christian readers have always 
known, within sight of the cross. It is there that this 
prophecy was fulfilled. But already the prophet had 


72 You Can Find God 

dared to link his own insight into the meaning of 
suffering with the mind of God. For there is a look 
of recognition in the face of the God whom the 
prophet sees in the darkness: 

“ Would I suffer for him that I love? 

So wilt thou, so dost thou/' 

Did those prophecies in Isaiah concerning the serv¬ 
ant of God who was bruised for our iniquities come to 
a prophet who had escaped from the darkness which 
fell upon his people? Could such a word have come 
to one who had not been prepared to enter into the 
deepest sorrows of his people? Not indeed to ob¬ 
servers and onlookers could such a vision come. It 
could come only in the darkness. 

If there are times when the burden of this sorrow¬ 
ful world rests heavily upon us and all our former 
hopes lie in the dust, when there is nothing for us but 
to leave the sunlit ways and enter into the darkness, 
then we need not think that we are leaving the God 
in whom we once believed. We may lose him for a 
time in order that we may have him forever. 

You can End God. You can find him in the dark¬ 
ness. There may come times when you can find him 
there and nowhere else. 




VI 

THE PLAIN MAN SEEKING HELPERS 


“ RELIGION is what the individual does with his 
own solitariness/' * This truth ought never to be for¬ 
gotten. We shall not find God unless we are willing 
to face the terrors as well as the wonders and joys of 
the solitary life. Our Lord left us in no doubt upon 
this matter. “ But thou when thou prayest enter into 
thine inner chamber and there pray to thy Father 
which seeth in secret." “ What we make of our soli¬ 
tariness " belongs to the heart of all religious experi¬ 
ence. 

Our Lord himself never seems to have been far from 
crowds during the daytime. It is surprising to read 
in the Gospels how swiftly a great multitude assem¬ 
bled. “ Straightway " there is a crowd at hand. But 
he knew the solitude in which “ man is least alone." 
In the hour of his temptation he withdrew into the 
desert, and often when the night came he withdrew 
to the mountains to be alone. In the wilderness the 
battle was fought to a finish in solitude. There the last 
victory was won. Jesus died alone. By what he made 
of his solitariness we have been redeemed. 

Let that be taken as truth, and truth of the first 
importance; and then let this also be added as no less 
true, that we need not be without helpers in our re- 
# A. N. Whitehead. 

73 





74 You Can Find God 

ligious life. By what we make of our company, we 
also determine what our religion will be. Our Lord 
told men that they could receive help from one an¬ 
other. It is characteristic of him that he sent his 
disciples out two and two; for two are more than twice 
one. He promised vision and resources to those who 
met in fellowship, “ to the two or three gathered in 
His name/' Near the end of his earthly life, this soli¬ 
tary Saviour gave thanks to his disciples because they 
had been with him in his temptations. There could 
have been no memory of the Lord to move the hearts 
of his friends like this. With him — in his tempta¬ 
tions! They were weak and faltering disciples, but he 
was grateful to them. To them! If in Gethsemane 
he was alone, that was not his choice. The three dis¬ 
ciples might have watched with him, but they slept. 

"The heavenly company watched while Jesus wept, 
The men he chose to share his secret slept.” 

Jesus did not think that his disciples should be with¬ 
out the confidence and insight and patience which 
come from the friendship of others. 

Here it should be made plain once more that pro¬ 
vision is made in the gospel not for rare spiritual be¬ 
ings nor for intellectual giants, but for man in every 
grade of his powers. 

It is taken for granted that the reader of this book 
does not think of himself as unlike other men; they 
and he are not given much to thinking upon those 
profound studies which engage the mind of philos¬ 
ophers. If they are thinking of them they do not know 
it; they are like M. Jourdain, who had been talking 
prose all his life but without knowing it. They are 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 75 

theologians without knowing it. They are not great 
readers; they do not travel far in the realm of litera¬ 
ture. They do not meet often with learned men. 
They take the eight-thirty a.m. to town and return by 
the five-thirty p.m. They have their own homes and, 
if they are lucky, a garden to which they give some of 
their leisure. For a fortnight each year they go to the 
sea. Their friends call in the evening to have a chat. 
They discuss the government with a clear view of its 
virtues or faults. They go to church, though not as 
regularly as their fathers did. When they are mar¬ 
ried and have children of their own, they are glad that 
the youngsters should be taught the truths of religion 
in Sunday school. Where in such a life is there an 
opportunity to look for God, if they may find him? 
They may give up the very idea of such a search and 
settle down to what they call their “ practical affairs/' 

It is idle to tell a man of this type that St. Augustine 
looked for God and found him after a long pilgrimage. 
He is not an Augustine. When he has listened in 
church or by the radio to the words of the mystics, he 
likens them to the poetry of Shelley or Keats. They 
are reports from a world in which he is not at home. 
It is a strange land with a language of its own, which 
means nothing to him. If he is to find God it must 
be within his own field of experience. There or no¬ 
where! 

If we deny to such men the reward of finding God 
we are making a serious charge against the character 
and purpose of God. We are saying that he is One 
who can certainly be found, but only by the wise and 
learned and privileged; he is out of the reach of Mr. 
Average Man. We have read of the Celestial Surgeon 


y6 You Can Find God 

and of the Comedian of the Heavens, but this would 
be a Celestial Snob who hides himself from all but 
the choice spirits and receives at his court only the 
most carefully selected mortals. There have even 
been mortals who have played the part of a lord cham¬ 
berlain, carefully selecting those who can be presented 
at such a court. 

By the conditions of their life, it is true, average 
people are unable to see the afterglow of the sunset 
on the Alps, or to hear the breakers on the coral reefs 
of the Pacific. They may say, as John Smith of Har¬ 
row said, “ The first thing I mean to do when I get to 
heaven is to go to Switzerland/' But if in the supreme 
quest of all they are shut out now from all possibility 
of finding the reward which God is said to offer to 
those who diligently seek him, then they have just 
cause to condemn the order in which they live. If it 
is for scholars alone to find him, they are cut off from 
the search. If they are to master the Bible as scholar¬ 
ship interprets it, they are cut off; they cannot hope in 
a crowded life to make time for that study. 

If God is to be found at all, he must be found by 
that man, who goes by the eight-thirty a.m., and deals 
all day with men in business, and comes back by the 
five-thirty p.m., tired and worried, to his home. Can 
he find God? 

Even the teachers of the church may forget this 
ordinary man in the ordinary ways of his life. They 
may,despair of him and settle down to the dark 
fact that their teaching will appeal only to the few 
elect spirits, and for the rest all that can be done is 
to render a little first aid. But they should take it 
as a first charge upon them to offer to every man 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 77 

in the everyday life the good news of God, not with 
any thought of taking him out of that everyday life but 
rather with the certainty that in that life he may have 
communion with God. 

Some of his hearers were called by our Lord to 
rise up and follow him. Others were sent back to 
their homes, there in the familiar surroundings, where 
everybody knew them, to declare what God had done 
for them. The Lord of the church chose some to 
be with him in the new ways, but he did not think of 
the others who stayed where they were as outside 
his kingdom. 

There are Christians of many grades of knowledge 
and sanctity. It is no part of the Christian faith to 
deny a place for ambition in the spiritual life. The 
instinct which found expression in coveting has to 
be turned to a nobler use. The Christian still covets, 
but he covets other things. “ Covet earnestly the 
best gifts ” But this is not to draw an inner circle 
of holy men and women, expert in the spiritual life, 
and to shut out the rest in an outer circle. There is 
always an inner Buddhism, and even Islam has had 
mystics with an interpretation of their faith from 
which the common believers were excluded. There 
have been some who have tried to introduce an inner 
Christianity, but they have never received the sanc¬ 
tion of the Christian church. 

When Pascal had that experience which is called 
his second conversion, he saw in the fire which shone 
upon him not the God of the wise and the philoso¬ 
phers, but “ the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ” 
— the God of human folk not troubled about deep 
problems of thought but busy with their flocks and 


78 You Can Find God 

herds. Pascal was a genius; but in his moment of 
vision, when God found him, he took his place with 
every man. 

It is for the average man that help must be sought. 
It is not enough to leave him in his own solitariness 
nor to provide him with books nor even with the 
great and wonderful mystery, the church. He needs 
something more personal. How is he in the ordi¬ 
nary ways of his life to seek for God? Are there any 
helpers waiting? 

It is in the realm of personal relationships that we 
must look for such help. In the gospel man is as clearly 
treated as a social being as in the teachings of philos¬ 
ophers and sages. Our Lord never dealt with man as 
though he were a being who could live a complete 
life outside such relationships. Robinson Crusoe on 
his island, before Friday entered into his life, was not 
prevented by his solitude from living a Christian life. 
But our Lord did not provide a way of life for Robin¬ 
son Crusoes. Such a man had no opportunity either 
of giving to others or of receiving from them, and he 
lived therefore a life less than complete, less even than 
human. He could not grow as others grow from all 
that they owe to their company. He could live such 
a life in memory and in hope; but that is not enough. 
In personal relationships we come to ourselves. There 
is something essentially Christian in the doctrine of 
Confucius, who recognized the five relationships in 
which life must be lived, those between old and young, 
parent and child, ruler and minister, husband and 
wife, elder and younger brother. Within such an 
order man must shape his conduct. There if any- 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 79 

where he must find himself. There also he can find 
God. 

“ Or what man is there of you who, if his son ask 
bread, will he give him a stone? ” 

“ For this cause shall a man leave his father and 
his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” 

“ No man can serve two masters.” 

“ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” 

In such words our Lord laid a supreme importance 
upon the relations in human life between persons. 

The question then arises: Can the average man, if 
he seeks to find God, discover any helper among the 
human beings to whom in some of the familiar ways 
of life he is related? The evidence is convincing that 
he can. 

If there is one book in which the solitary life is 
set forth it is Pilgrim's Progress. But in that same 
book the pilgrim finds many to whom he owes his 
very soul. 

When Christian set out from the City of De¬ 
struction he soon fell into the Slough of Despond, 
and there he might have remained floundering if a 
King’s officer whose name was Help had not come 
to his aid. He it was who pointed out the steps by 
means of which Christian arrived at the other side. 
And Help was but one of many of the King’s officers 
on the Way. 

It is no part of our search for God that we should 
despise such royal officers. We may think that it is 
a finer thing to stand alone and be quite self-sufficient. 
We may misuse certain great truths —this, for ex- 


8o 


You Can Find God 

ample, that no man can come between our souls and 
God. That saying is true if it is rightly interpreted, 
but it may become a misleading fiction. If Help came 
between Christian and God, it was as when an ap¬ 
pointed instrument comes between the user of it and 
the other who gave it. Help was between the pilgrim 
and the rest of the journey and the Celestial City, but 
only as an escort appointed by the Lord of that coun¬ 
try; not a deputy for him, but a guide who was a min¬ 
ister of peace, one in whom and through whom the 
King of Christian's seeking came to his aid. 

It is necessary to use plain words on this matter. 
Many men come*to see late, too late in life, how 
much they would have gained if in some earlier day 
they had sought the help of others, help which was 
freely offered to them. Whether in their studies, 
or in their activities in the service of the church or 
the city or the nation, they could have been saved 
much waste of energy and been able to make much 
more of themselves if they had not confused self- 
sufficiency and self-respect, and magnified their pride 
into the virtue of independence. 

There is an area in our life in which we say that we 
are self-sufficient. There, at least, we are alone. At the 
last, “ I ” — that real “ I ” — must say the last word. 
But there are many lines of communication between 
that “ I ” and others, and we should be foolish not to 
use them. 

This is how the case may be put to a would-be 
seeker. You wish to find God in the realities of your 
life. You are not the first to seek for him. You have 
within your circle of friends others who have learned 
something on the way. They are willing to put their 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 81 

resources at your disposal. Why not use them? If 
you proposed to travel in Central Africa and a man 
who had been over at least some of the ground offered 
to tell you of his journeys, to show you his maps, to 
give you valuable warnings of dangers, would you not 
be senseless to declare that you must win your own 
way and start where others started? No man must 
come between you and that unknown land! But 
why not? 

This is a counsel which those whose life is now 
largely in the past can give with authority to others: 
Do not be too proud to seek and to accept help. One 
of the noblest of all Christian men in the last gener¬ 
ation, Bishop Westcott, at the end of a long life said, 
“ Again and again I have lost the help of sympathy, 
since I was unwilling to claim from those * who called 
me friend 9 the sacrifice which I was myself ready 
to make.” That is the confession which many others 
will share. It can be set down for the sake of others 
who need not make the same mistake. There are 
some who are ready to give to them all that they have 
to give, and it is worth having. Why do without it? 

The man within the field of whose life there is not 
some minister of religion must be unusual. It will 
seem almost a matter for jest to some readers to say 
in these days that a minister of the church can help 
them in their search for God. But why is it thought 
impossible? It is true that among the thousands who 
are in this calling some are simply professional, others 
are officers of an institution, others, though they are 
probably very few, are insincere. But when this is 
admitted, there remain in the society in which we live 
a number of men who early in life had a call to the 


82 


You Can Find God 


holy ministry. They might have followed other ways 
of life; they chose this. For years it was their one 
concern to prepare themselves for their calling by 
study and by a life of devotion. They listened to 
scholars; they read books; they sought to know the 
Holy Scriptures in the light that modern scholarship 
could give them. They learned to know the mind of 
the church, as it can be read in books and in creeds 
and in sacraments. Afterwards in their own parishes 
they came to deal with a strangely varied company 
of men and women and children. If they were true 
to their calling they were like physicians who have 
rare opportunities for knowing people. In the medi¬ 
cal profession it is recognized that the “ local prac¬ 
titioner ” has a most important part to play in medical 
research. I can remember hearing a great specialist 
give as his testimony that he was dependent upon the 
detail work of the thousands of general practitioners 
up and down the land. Was there not a doctor in 
a tiny village who in a general practice fitted himself 
to become a leading authority on the heart? 

In like manner there are thousands of ministers 
of religion — general practitioners, if you like —with 
an experience long and varied and comprehensive 
who are at your service. Why, for example, let your 
progress be hindered by false interpretations of the 
Christian religion which any good minister of the 
gospel could dispel? As Dr. Edwyn Bevan says: 

What strikes one about most contemporary 
attacks on Christian views of the world is how 
seldom they come to close quarters with any 
Christian view as set forth by its best exponents. 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 83 

They almost always attack Christianity as they 
have found it represented by some poorly edu¬ 
cated clergyman in the next street or some dull 
traditionalist who taught them at school.* 

There is that danger. The way of escape from it 
cannot be withdrawal from all helpers, but rather the 
seeking out of competent helpers, who are to be found 
by those who will look for them. Two examples, out 
of many which might easily be given, may serve to 
illustrate this truth. 

At the music festival in Leeds, England, in 1904, 
D. Ffranggon Davies, a singer whom many still re¬ 
member with gratitude, was singing the part of Hans 
Sachs in The Master singers. In the audience there 
was a man of forty years of age who was seeking help 
in his own spiritual life. When he heard the singer, 
though the artist was not singing music classed as 
sacred, he was deeply stirred and knew that he was 
indeed in the presence of a “ master singer ” and a 
master mind and spirit. Two years later this listener 
went to see Ffranggon and, being himself an accom¬ 
plished amateur singer, arranged to have lessons with 
him. In this way he came to understand the quality 
and nature of that mysterious something which had 
moved him in Leeds. In time that great singer be¬ 
came an informal spiritual director to his student. 
How he guided him is told in a little book, Lead Thou . * 
At last in a flash of vision and insight the student 
came to see the great sacrifice of Christ and handed 
himself over as a living sacrifice to him; and there 

* Christianity (Thornton Butterworth), p. 253. 

# Published by Blackwell. 


84 You Can Find God 

came joy and peace as in a flood. He hastened to tell 
Ffranggon what had happened, and together they sang 
their doxology. Only once afterward did the stu¬ 
dent see his master. That was in Liverpool, where 
Ffranggon had been singing Elgar's The Apostles. In 
that oratorio there is the incident in which Christ, 
walking on the waters, says to Peter, “ Come." The 
last words spoken by Ffranggon as he parted from his 
friend are recorded: "Now remember, John, Christ 
has said to you: 'Come.' You have left your boat 
to come to him. As often as you take your eyes off 
him so often, like Peter, will you sink in the troubled 
waters of life." 

The point of this story is that a helper was at hand 
for the seeker, and this helper was revealed not in 
any definitely religious act but in the way in which he 
was doing his work as a singer. Here was a layman 
singing a gloriously human part, but singing it in such 
a way that the spiritual man was revealed. 

Though never in the same form, to other seekers 
the same experience may come if they are ready to 
accept it when it comes. The sad fact remains that 
there is help waiting for many a baffled seeker, and 
either he will not look for it or he is too proud or 
too shy to take it when it is offered. 

The other story is of one known and revered by 
all who belong to the Student Christian Movement 
or to the Boys' Brigade, and indeed by all who can re¬ 
member the closing years of the Victorian era. 

The story of Henry Drummond can be told from 
his side; it can also be told from the side of the thou¬ 
sands of men who sought help from him. For them 
life would have been different if they had never taken 


The Plain Man Seeking Helpers 85 

Drummond into their confidence. One of them said 
that in after years, when Drummond was dead, he 
found himself unconsciously praying to him. It was a 
noble work for that knightly soul to give himself to 
the students of his day; it was at the same time a 
right thing for those young men to accept his help 
in their search for life. 

In 1873 Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, the 
two famous American evangelists, went to the British 
Isles where they were practically unknown. One 
preached, the other sang the gospel. At first they 
roused little interest, but when they went north to 
Newcastle the story of their mission spread to Scot¬ 
land. Many who were studying for the ministry in 
that country were drawn into the service of Moody's 
mission. Among them was Henry Drummond, a 
student for the ministry, a man whom those who 
knew him best called a Galahad or a Bayard. Drum¬ 
mond became a teacher of science, a traveler in Cen¬ 
tral Africa, a speaker to whose quiet and beautiful 
addresses hearers were eager to listen, whether in his 
native Scotland or in the west of London or in the 
growing city of Chicago. But in the school of Moody 
he learned that the distinctive service which he was 
to give was to individual souls. They came to know 
that in this gentle and courteous scholar there was a 
Greatheart waiting to come to their aid. 

If only there were such men everywhere! But per¬ 
haps there are more than we are disposed to think. 
If you would find God it may be that the way ap¬ 
pointed for you is to seek some such helper. The way 
is more open today. There is much more frankness 
in these days than in the time of our fathers. Then, 


86 


You Can Find God 


men might see one another daily, attend the same 
church, discuss politics and business freely — and never 
mention the name of God. Today men are much 
more ready to talk freely upon religion. And in any 
community there are some at least who are willing 
to talk seriously and practicably upon the things that 
concern God and the soul. Why should you not make 
use of those who desire nothing more than to be used 
by you? 


illl!llllllllllll!llllllll!ll!lllllllllll!ll!!llllllll 

VII 

THE THING THAT CANNOT BE DEFERRED 


The night cometh when no man can work. 
John 9:4. 

The great Enigma is not solved by death but by 
life. A Pilgrim’s Quest for the Divine. 

YOU , but only the Real You , can find God , and that 
Real You is a sinner , who needs a Redeemer. 

There are things in our life that can wait and things 
that cannot wait. Why does the Christian faith give 
urgency to some things and not to others? Why are its 
teachers content to leave whole provinces of knowl¬ 
edge unexplored? When they speak of God why 
are they content to say of him, “ Verily, thou art a 
God that hidest thyself ” ? And in the same breath 
with such words they tell us, “ Now is the appointed 
time." We are encouraged to think of ourselves as 
heirs of eternity, and at the same time to remember 
that the night cometh when no man can work and 
that for such work it is now or never. We have eter¬ 
nity in our heart, and yet we must not waste our life 
in time. It is important to get our emphasis right. 

Christianity is separated from all religions in which 
this earth is treated as a place of unreality and even of 
illusion. Rather is it distinguished by the solemn 
urgency with which it treats the things that happen in 
time. The Christian has never been allowed to sepa- 
87 




88 You Can Find God 

rate time from eternity, as though, time being short 
and fleeting, the things that happen in time can have 
no meaning in eternity. For him issues must be de¬ 
termined in time which can be understood only in 
the light of eternity. This follows since the Christian 
faith is centered not on the Absolute or the Infinite 
of which philosophers speak, but on the God who be¬ 
came flesh and dwelt among us. If he has been mani¬ 
fest in the flesh the realm in which life in the flesh 
is passed cannot be unreal. 

Sometimes Christians have been tempted to take 
refuge in the belief that this world of time and space 
is to be despised. The first great struggle within the 
church was not to keep the belief in the divinity of 
Christ, but to hold fast to the reality of his earthly 
life. Men hesitated to believe that he could have 
been man. But the Christian mind has always clung 
to that human life. We can hear the emphatic fall 
of the hammer as the words are driven home, “ He 
was crucified, dead and buried/' There was no illu¬ 
sion in the cross. In time the Lord Crucified re¬ 
vealed an eternal reality. Since this is the very heart 
of their faith Christians have never been satisfied 
with a redemption which was only a play or romance 
and would make this life only a trivial prelude to the 
real thing — the curtain-raiser before the masterpiece 
begins. On the contrary, when they have seriously 
thought out their faith they have always believed that 
it is theirs in time — it must be historical. We can 
escape from many difficulties by abandoning the field 
of history, but by escaping in this way we shall lose 
our faith altogether. A Christianity made so easy will 
cease to exist. 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 89 

In this life, if this faith is true, there must be ur¬ 
gency, but where is it to be found? What is there in 
this life of time which is characteristic of it? What 
is the thing for which we cannot afford to wait? What 
happens here? 

If our search for God were for our intellectual satis¬ 
faction only there might be reason to suppose that, 
since God is from eternity the same, the eye of the 
soul may be able to see him beyond death more clearly 
than now. So far as intellectual comprehension of 
God is concerned, we have no access to it now; it 
must be deferred beyond the bounds of time. Now 
we see as in a glass darkly; then, and not till then, 
will we see face to face. We have no reason to think 
that only in this life must we seek the hidden ways of 
God. As a philosopher I cannot know all the mysteries 
of God. But can I, as a sinful man, know him as my 
Redeemer? 

There is a distinction to be made between the 
understanding of God and the life which is lived by 
faith in him. In our living we cannot stop the ma¬ 
chinery in order that we may think out its mysteries. 
It is no doubt valuable for a man to understand the 
science of digestion. But we may study it now or put 
off the study till a later time, and still go on digesting. 
We may do the thing without knowing how we do it. 

If religion were the scientific explanation of our 
inward life we might wait till a convenient time came 
for us to study it. In any case it would be largely a 
matter for experts. But if the kingdom of God, as 
we are taught, is not in word, but in power, then 
clearly we cannot wait for something in it which is 
all-important. 


90 You Can Find God 

If indeed we were seeking the evidence for a First 
Cause, our worship would no doubt be enriched by 
finding the proof, but we might not discover any 
change in our practical life; in life we might not be 
better men, nor braver in death. If we found out 
this truth only when youth was past we might regret 
the delay, but we should not think it tragic or irrep¬ 
arable. It is when we come to our religion considered 
as one of redemption that we begin to understand 
where the urgency lies. 

The only faith with which we have to do is not 
a creed that teaches us to believe in a First Cause 
or a Creator or a Supreme Court in the heavens. All 
this is true. But who could read the New Testament 
or the liturgies of the church and say that this Chris¬ 
tianity is a religion of the First Cause or a worship 
of the Absolute? The cry that is heard and answered 
is not, “ Who will give me light? ” but, “ What must 
I do to be saved? ” It brings the offer from the God 
of holy love, not of a life enlightened or even reformed, 
but delivered and made new. The Lord Christ is said 
to have brought into human life a revolution: “ Old 
things are passed away: behold they are become new.” 
Since therefore we are dealing with such a newly 
released power which does things, then it makes a 
difference when it is released and when things are 
done. If, for example, youth becomes one thing in 
the faith of Christ and another and an entirely differ¬ 
ent thing with Christ, then something is lost when 
youth does not find Christ — something that cannot 
be gained equally well in manhood or age. 

If it is no exaggeration but a plain statement of 
fact that St. Paul lived, and yet not he but Christ in 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 91 

him, then it was a matter of importance to him —■ 
and he knew it — that for years before the light came 
to him he had missed it. 

This is not to be considered by the customary meas¬ 
ures of gain and loss. We do not think rightly as 
long as we move in the realm of prudence or security 
or as though we had to make provision against a 
possible doom after* death. If it were a question for 
us of taking out a policy of security then a change at 
the last moment might be enough. If I am taking 
out a life policy and finish the negotiations in good 
time, however near to the end, the policy stands. I 
shall have lost only whatever relief of mind I might 
have had during the earlier years, but nothing more. 

We cannot deal with God on any footing of this 
kind. It is a serious danger that we are likely to think 
of him by analogies taken from human life not at its 
best, but from its meaner ways. Man has brought 
often to the interpretation of his religion not his best, 
but his worst qualities. The truth has to be faced, 
as it was once said, that man may cling to God with 
his weakness and find in his God a larger self — him¬ 
self cast upon the screen of the universe, himself 
arbitrary, acquisitive, revengeful, even deceitful. If 
God were such, and the only matter of importance 
were to be in his favor, then it would not matter greatly 
whether the necessary steps were taken today or to¬ 
morrow. It might even be doubtful whether they 
should be taken at all. 

But with the God whose face we have seen in 
Jesus Christ all merely formal submission counts for 
nothing. All analogies from insurance against loss 
are idle. No less are the analogies from tyrannies. It 


92 You Can Find God 

was not to enlist slaves to do his bidding blindly that 
God made this creation; it was that his children might 
be trained in time to become his sons, and sons who 
enter in some measure into his holy love. That must 
be the reason why in time certain things cannot be 
postponed, why there are works to be done before 
this day ends, and only then; since the night cometh 
when no man can work. Such works must have to 
do with the distinctive character of this life, and that 
distinctive character lies in moral obedience. 

When we have come so far we are faced by one 
fact difficult to many modern readers and yet trans¬ 
parently clear in the New Testament — the one ur¬ 
gent, central, all-determining fact that God is related 
to man not first of all as the Almighty to his creature, 
nor as the mysterious Cause of all things to the 
thinker, but to all men wise or simple as the Saviour 
to the saved. It is with sin we have to deal in this 
earthly life; if we are to find God, we cannot defer to 
some future day our facing this fact of sin and of for¬ 
giveness. 

“ Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Call 
ye upon him while he is near: let the wicked forsake 
his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and 
let him return unto the Lord and he will have mercy 
upon him/' 

If it is in moral obedience that the secret lies, then 
the tragedy of sin must be faced. We must listen to 
the call for repentance. 

What the prophet had demanded the Lord himself 
also demanded. Jesus came into Galilee preaching 
good news of God and declaring that the kingdom of 
God was at hand, and saying, “ Repent ye.” Those 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 93 

who took up his word — St. Paul and all the apostles 
— call with one voice upon men everywhere to repent. 
If we are thinking of the search for God we come to 
this serious call from which we cannot escape. 

There are gods of another character whom we may 
think we find. But if God is what the Christian faith 
believes him to be, the holy Father, then to seek for 
him is vain unless we are ready to deal with the last 
fact of all. We shall not find him except as sinners 
find their Saviour. We shall not enter into his king¬ 
dom except as those who have been redeemed. Other 
things can wait; this cannot. The character of all the 
days of our life is determined by this relationship. 
Our lives will come to their full fruitage and bear their 
divine harvest to the degree that we face these two 
most tremendous facts: we are sinful men; and God 
is in Christ reconciling us to himself, and to himself 
as the holy Lord. 

We can have confirmation of this truth in the story 
of those who have been this way before us. If we 
ask where these others have found God, we shall find 
ourselves in a world with a language unfamiliar to our 
ears. We shall need to learn that language. Sin, 
judgment, forgiveness, holiness have become to us 
technical words to be studied in the light of history, 
but without relation to our policy of life. Everyone 
who preaches today knows that he speaks to hearers 
with whom he cannot begin where preachers could 
once begin. 

“ What in the dickens is sin? ” a student inquired 
of a professor of biblical literature. The student is 
not alone. What is sin? That is a question prior to 
many others. What is repentance; forgiveness; the 


94 You Can Find God 

new birth; the life of sanctity? It is of little use to 
take any of these words for granted. To tell some 
hearers today that they must repent is to speak in a 
foreign tongue. To introduce them to a world in 
which this is a cardinal necessity is to leave them per¬ 
plexed and bewildered. They are willing to let words 
stand in the ritual of the church; they belong to a 
tradition which they do not wish to banish. But 
what it means for them to repent they do not know. 

If God is set before them as the eternal Truth, they 
can understand how he may answer the cry of their 
souls, “ Give me reality.” 

If he is set before them as Beauty, so old and yet 
so new, they will know him as the answer to their cry: 
“ Give me the vision of that beauty which I have 
loved, though so late. Let the beauty of the Lord our 
God be upon me.” 

But there is another cry which was once the most 
bitter cry of all: “ Give me holiness; set me free from 
sin.” But is that a cry which means to us what it 
meant to the psalmists or to the apostles? This ques¬ 
tion must be borne in mind even while at all costs we 
keep from unreal words. If “ sin ” and “ repentance ” 
are no longer words with their old meaning we must 
not pretend that they are. The men of olden times 
spoke of the burden of sin as intolerable; is it intoler¬ 
able to us? They wrote such words as those of the 
fifty-first Psalm: “ Have mercy upon me, O God, ac¬ 
cording to thy lovingkindness ” ; or the seventh chap¬ 
ter of Romans: “ Who shall deliver me from the body 
of this death? ” But is it a body of death to us? 

But we should not assume that we are right in dis¬ 
missing the language of that lost world as old and out- 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 95 

worn. What we are concerned with is not a mere 
dialect invented and used by the church. We shall 
find vast areas of our human inheritance lost to us 
if we cease to know the meaning of sin and judgment. 
The thought that man is a sinner is not only in the 
very texture of the Christian religion; it is essential 
to all the greatest literature. If we do not find any 
meaning in sin we shall fail to understand not only 
Dante, but also Shakespeare. Who can read Lear or 
Othello without keeping in mind the mystery of sin? 
Where lies the one eternal theme of tragedy but in 
the human will, tempted, torn, resisting, yielding, re¬ 
morseful, despairing, doomed to judgment? Leave 
out the conception of conscience, and what becomes 
of tragedy, whether it is the Greek tragedies or the 
Elizabethan, or the plays of Ibsen? If a modern man 
is unwilling to read the Epistle to the Romans he can 
read Crime and Punishment or Peer Gynt and he will 
still ask, “ What is sin? ” 

But it may be held that, serious as the loss of the 
great tragedies would be, we might have to do without 
them, and the time must come in which Othello will 
be as remote from our culture as the fifty-first Psalm 
or the seventh chapter of Romans. That may come 
to pass. But we must not cast away the universal 
tradition of the human spirit without knowing what 
we are doing. We must at least face the seriousness 
of the change, which must be nothing less than a revo¬ 
lution in the inner life of man. Before we accept it 
as a loss, necessary though to be regretted, we might 
well ask how far we have outlived, not the language, 
but the spiritual experiences which found expression 
in it. 


96 You Can Find God 

We must prepare ourselves for the call to repent¬ 
ance for sin not by any journeys to far-off lands but 
by looking at the world from the place where we stand. 

How can we explain what is wrong with the world? 
Or rather why do we say that something is wrong with 
the world? What standard have we by means of which 
we can say that life falls short? I must ask this ques¬ 
tion; but why must I ask it? So far as we can tell the 
human family alone of all the creatures of the earth 
asks such questions. Man alone inquires, “ What is 
wrong with the world? ” Man alone has a picture 
before his mind of what the earth might he like. He 
alone measures it by a standard of hidden values. 

But what is wrong? It is certainly not the lack of 
knowledge only, though we have no right to think of 
knowledge as if it makes no difference. We must 
have knowledge, whatever else we have; but it is not 
a complete answer to say that if we only knew enough 
the wrong in the world would disappear. 

The difference between man as he is today and as 
he might be in a changed world must be measured not 
only in terms of knowledge but also in terms of will, 
and of will at the service of love. We must desire 
different things, we must be ready to do different 
things, if we are to be set free. To that answer we 
move by the sheer pressure of facts. 

It is a common experience for anyone who lives 
near a great city to look over the valley to the hills 
on the other side. From there the city, vast in its 
population, looks like a monstrous village. There is 
something wonderful and exhilarating in the sight of 
a city. Within it are many brave and patient workmen 
of God, servants of whom he is not ashamed. Within 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 97 

it are artists, craftsmen, poets, musicians, scholars 
spending their days in search of truth, lovers of their 
fellows fighting for justice. There no appeal to the 
heart of man will miss its response. There saints are 
offering up their prayers and martyrs are dying. On the 
altars of ten thousand homes the fire of pure love is 
kept burning. 

But what is wrong there? What is it that turns 
into evil the instinct by virtue of which the noblest 
achievements of man are wrought? Why does the 
instinct of adventure which leads men to take the 
hazards of the explorer become degraded to the ugly 
and selfish passion of the gambler? Why is love de¬ 
graded to lust? What is wrong? 

If we answer that question we shall know more of 
the God whom we must seek in that city. He must 
be One who deals with that very thing that is wrong. 
He must be One who can deal with that wrong now. 
There can be no answer to this need of ours in some 
other world or beyond the limits of time. We must 
have a God who can come to our rescue now. 

You can find such a God there in the city. But 
you must be ready to find him in judgment and in 
mercy —in judgment, for only in judgment can he 
reveal his mercy, and in judgment which begins not 
with them but with you. 

The reality and the horror of sin can still be brought 
home to those who are prepared to look at the world 
with honest eyes. Those who doubt might read, or 
reread, the story of Josephine Butler. This woman 
left with all who knew her such memories as saints 
leave. She belonged to the company of St. Catherine 
and St. Theresa, of Elizabeth Fry and Sister Dora — 


You Can Find God 


98 

saints with the power to translate their visions into 
action. In her home she heard the cry of the women 
of England who had been wronged by the passing of 
the Contagious Diseases Act. These women were 
what is called “ lost/' but for her they were sisters for 
whom Christ died, not chattels for the use of men. 
The story of the battle that she and her friends fought 
and won is one of the noblest in the history of Christ 
and his people. In that story anyone who chooses 
can read the secret of sin. 

One of these poor girls for whom she cared, near 
the end of her life said to Josephine Butler: “ When 
your soul quails at the sight of the evil, which will 
increase yet awhile, dear Mrs. Butler, think of me and 
take courage. God has given me to you that you 
may never despair of any.” 

Of another there is this record: 

She drew us near to her by the appeal of her 
earnest eyes, and raising her right hand high, 
with a strangely solemn gesture, and with a look 
full of heroic and desperate resolve, she said: “ I 
will fight for my soul through hosts and hosts and 
hosts. . . ” “ Poor brave child,” I cried to her, 
“ you will find on the other shore One waiting 
for you who has fought through all those hosts 
for you, who will not treat you as man has treated 
you.” * 

It was in dealing not with statistics and acts of 
Parliament only but with living souls that the fire was 
kept burning with such a fierce and steady glow through 
the years of that long campaign. The nature of the 
* Josephine Butler, Life of George Butler (Arrowsmith). 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 99 

injustice against which Josephine Butler fought was 
kept steadily before her in flesh and blood. It was no 
abstract evil against which she fought. What is wrong 
in the world is to be sought not in abstractions but 
in persons. 

If we want to know what sin means it can be learned 
here. If we are tempted to explain away the evil that 
is in the world by a hasty and superficial use of psy¬ 
chology we shall learn our error; we shall be “ con¬ 
victed of sin,” as our fathers used to say. And once 
more we shall be carried to the house of Simon the 
leper and hear the comforting words of the Saviour: 
“ Her sins which are many are forgiven her because 
she loved much.” 

But it is one mark of our modern attitude toward life 
that we are quick to see ourselves as bound up with the 
social and international order. If “ sin ” is to mean 
much to us it will have to be interpreted for us in all the 
relationships of our life. 

Dickens in Hard Times drew the character of Mr. 
Gradgrind, a hard, merciless manufacturer in the days 
when, in order to amass wealth rapidly, men found 
comfort in the separation of their business practices, 
which were under “ economic law,” from their religion. 
If Mr. Gradgrind had been called a sinner he might 
have answered with anger: “ What do you mean? I 
am sober; I pay my debts; I am not an adulterer or a 
thief; I tell the truth ”; and such an answer might have 
been satisfactory at one time to many companies of 
Christian people. It is not satisfactory today. We 
should reply, "All these commandments you may 
have kept, but you are not therefore free from sin. 
You have treated human beings as tools to minister to 


100 


You Can Find God 

your greed. You have missed the presence of Christ 
in them; he is hungry and you have not fed him, sick 
and you have not cared for him. You have set up a 
screen that you call ‘ economic necessity ' to conceal 
your real motives of selfishness and greed. If the will 
of the Most High is the same today as it was when 
Isaiah prophesied and the apostles witnessed to Christ, 
then you are a sinner in need of forgiveness and mercy.” 

There is no reason why we should treat sin as a word 
descriptive only of the individual life; it can be used 
and must be used in our discussion of social and na¬ 
tional choices. There is guilt upon the soul of a 
people; and it is to a nation, as to an individual soul, 
that the words of the prophet still come. To that also 
we must come if we would deal with sin in a realistic 
way. 

But we shall not escape from the call to penitence by 
putting all the blame for what is wrong upon the com¬ 
munity. We shall not plead that there is no neces¬ 
sity for us personally to stand before the judgment seat 
of Christ on the excuse that it was not we but the 
church or the nation which was to blame. If we are 
to find the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ our 
Lord, and find him in all his grace and power, we must 
expose ourselves to his searching light. We shall con¬ 
fess: “ I am the social problem. I am the problem of 
war. I am the man who must know God's judgment 
and receive his mercy.” 

This chapter has been long and discursive. Ques¬ 
tions have been asked and the shaping of the answers 
has been left to the reader. But an attempt must be 
made to gather up some of the threads. 


101 


The Thing That Cannot Be Deferred 

We live in a world in which something is wrong. 
There is in human life a false principle at work. It has 
its hold upon the will of man. It makes him do the 
thing that he would not. It turns human society, 
which should be a scene of cooperation, into one of 
war. It makes the loveliest things on earth shameful 
things from which men turn their faces. It changes 
love into lust, adventure into gambling, fellowship into 
a selfish policy of each for himself. 

The very hold upon us of this false principle which 
we call sin makes it necessary for us to seek deliverance. 
We know how idle it is to give good advice, or to re¬ 
ceive it, if nothing more is available; we need a hand 
not our own to lift us now above what we can be 
unaided. 

Sin is a disease of the will. We must have a physi¬ 
cian. What is wrong with us is not ignorance nor folly, 
but this disease which holds us down where we are 
most ourselves. Jesus said the will is in the control of 
“ the Prince of this world/' 

This disease has not only made us do things which 
were false to our true life, but it has made us into per¬ 
sonalities with this sad distinction, that we alone of the 
creatures of earth betray our own life. We sin against 
God. 

When we speak of forgiveness we mean that miracle 
whereby, in place of bondage to this evil principle, we 
are given a new freedom. In place of a broken rela¬ 
tionship there is a new restored relationship of the 
child to his Father. We are at peace with God. And 
when to this we add, “ through our Lord Jesus Christ ” 
we make clear to ourselves why it was that Jesus Christ 
came, suffered, died and rose again. It was not to en- 


102 


You Can Find God 

lighten us only or to give us good counsel, but to de¬ 
liver us from the power which holds us down and to 
restore us to the true relationship to God. It was this 
strange and wonderful thing which he did for us. He 
came to bring us to God. 

Repentance is the adjustment of all our being to this 
new fact. It means the turning away from the old 
life of sin. But in the New Testament it is more often 
considered as the turning to something. The repent¬ 
ant soul looks away to the Lord in whom the kingdom 
has drawn near. Faith must be the act of surrender 
to that Lord in all the range of his truth and grace. 
“I believe ,I belong” 

All these things we must prove in our own experi¬ 
ences. The serious matter is that they must be proved 
in experience now. Other things may wait. These 
cannot. 




VIII 

THE SEEKER WHO IS SOUGHT 


YOU cannot find God without seeking; but will all 
your seeking find him unless something else can be 
said concerning him? Can man by searching End out 
God? There can be only one possible answer if all the 
searching is on the side of man. If God can be per¬ 
fectly described as the God who hides himself then the 
human seeker is playing a tragic game of hide-and-seek; 
he cannot hope to do more than touch the outermost 
reaches of the kingdom; he will seek and never find. 

We are driven to reconsider the seeking of man, 
still in the light of what we believe man to be. 

What are the choices among which we must decide 
when we try to answer this question? There may be 
before man at least three possible ways of making 
sense of his life. He may be explained as a seeker, or as 
one who is sought, or as both seeker and sought. 

He is a seeker. Of that we have no doubt. In every 
field of his life, from the beginning, his characteristic 
role has been that of the explorer and the pilgrim. All 
his earthly pilgrimages are a sign that his life itself is a 
pilgrimage in eternity. 

But many, with the same facts before them, can 
explain the many movements of man’s heart and mind 
only by the truth that man is entirely in the hands of 
his God. When God needs man he seeks him and 

103 




104 You Gan Find God 

will not let him go. If he does not need man, then 
man is left alone. Man cannot of himself find God. 
All is of God. 

Others there are who cannot be satisfied that either 
explanation makes sense of the experiences which 
man has put on record. They do not pretend to have 
found any complete and final system in which man will 
know as he is known, nor can they be content with a 
compromise. Taking away part of the claim for man 
as a seeker and part of the claim for him as one sought, 
they invite him to think of himself as a neutral figure 
somewhere between the two — a tamer, reduced be¬ 
ing, not in reality all that we mean by a seeker nor all 
that we should expect of one who is sought. But this 
will not do; whatever else man is he is not a poor half- 
and-half creature. If he were, how does it happen that 
he harbors such wild hopes and such dark despair? 
Why has he never been content with a safe and satis¬ 
factory midway position? 

There is one more explanation. We may refuse to 
accept the dilemma “ either ... or ” and say boldly, 
“ Man is both ” — both seeker and sought. The time 
is not yet ripe for our understanding of how that can 
be. At present we have only some facts before us, and 
those we have are fragmentary and unarranged and 
easily misread. It is always necessary to guard against 
a hasty attempt to present a complete account of hu¬ 
man life. 

It is best to accept the mystery in this strange matter 
in which we have no parallel to guide us. Human life 
is a thing by itself; we may understand many of its 
phases while all the time we know that we are dealing 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 105 

with a mystery. We shall learn all that life means 
when the shadows flee away, but not now. Our pres¬ 
ent wisdom is to hold firmly to that which we know 
and to refuse to construct prematurely complete 
systems. 

It may well be asked: If there are various ways of ex¬ 
plaining the same facts, to what authority should we 
listen? Who has the best right to speak? Has one 
man any more right than another to say whether the 
human facts are best explained by the belief that man 
seeks, or that he is sought, or that he is himself both 
the seeker and the sought? 

For the evidence we must go to the inner life of 
man, for who else can speak for man save he himself? 
We have to do with the spirit of man as that has been 
revealed. It is impossible, for example, to form any 
judgment of poetry without the evidence of the poets. 
Others may “ reason and welcome,” but only these can 
know. In like manner, the saints’ evidence of their 
own inner life can be given only by them. The evi¬ 
dence for the experience of Christ which made life new 
for St. Paul could have been neither produced nor ex¬ 
plained by the men who sat in judgment upon him — 
by Felix or Festus or Agrippa or Nero. It might be 
true or not; these men could only say, "We do not 
know.” 

But if the evidence of that for which we seek ex¬ 
planation comes from such men — prophets, or poets, 
or saints — there is some reason for asking as well their 
explanation of their experience. They may very well 
say not only, “ This happened to me,” but “ When it 
happened it clearly came from a certain source of which 


106 You Can Find God 

I can testify.” If they give us an explanation there 
must be something within us that confirms it. In the 
language which an old friend loved to use, “ They ring 
the bell within us.” But we shall be foolish if we wait 
till we have risen to the experience of the saints before 
we accept their faith. Our Lord said, “ He that re- 
ceiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall re¬ 
ceive a prophet's reward,” and this reward may be the 
joyful assurance that the word which has come to the 
prophet is the word of the living God. We may re¬ 
ceive a prophet and in our own measure enter into his 
vision. 

There is no one who can speak upon the character 
and source of the experience of man in his dealings 
with God with such authority as those for whom these 
things are not hearsay, but first-hand realities. 

For what, then, must we go to our authorities? 

If it were true that man seeks, and that nothing 
more is known of him but that, we should expect him 
to show a certain character. His make-up would pre¬ 
sent little mystery. We do know him as seeker, but 
we are left with much in his own account of himself 
which will not fit into this theory at all. Certainly he 
is always seeking — but he has never believed that this 
urge to seek explains his life. He has gained some¬ 
thing, but he can never say that he has won it by him¬ 
self; he cannot escape from the suspicion that it may 
have been given to him. He has an inner life of his 
own about which he knows little; but what he does 
know shows it to be an arena in which many powers are 
at work. Who or what these powers are he can only 
conjecture, but he knows enough to be certain that he 
is not to be explained as a self-contained, self-directed 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 107 

being. Whatever else he may be, he is not a self-made 
man. 

Man's very seekings are not easy to explain. He can 
understand, indeed, why he must go out as a huntsman 
seeking for food and clothing. But why is he prepared 
to fling away life itself for some gain which by the 
standard of utility is worth nothing or less than noth¬ 
ing? Why should he leave his home and cross the 
margin of that world which lies beyond the horizon? 
Why should he watch through the night reading the 
stars? It seems to him at least reasonable to conjec¬ 
ture that in these promptings Someone or Something 
is moving him. Man has always had, and still has, 
suspicion that he is the quarry of some Power which 
seeks him. It is not conceit that leads him to think 
that he is of some importance in the universe of which 
he is a part; it is reasonable inference from the facts, 
as he has understood them, of his own life. 

Man must be true to facts. To reach a logical con¬ 
clusion by omitting one or other of them, or by shaping 
them, taking off a little here and a little there, is un¬ 
thinkable to a man who takes life seriously. No ex¬ 
planation is worth anything which does not cover the 
crude and formless facts. Better no explanation at all 
than a juggled answer! Meanwhile there are clues, 
hints, surmises which have been provided for us by our 
most credible witnesses; to them man must give atten¬ 
tion. He cannot delight, as the writer of fiction may, 
in weaving mysteries with the purpose of explaining 
them at the end. Whatever else human life may be it 
is not a mystery story designed by the divine Artist to 
keep us guessing till the end. 

Seeker or sought or both. If we suppose that life is 


108 You Can Find God 

a drama, it is not one in which the players need count 
themselves helpless or paralyzed till the final curtain 
falls and they discover the plot in all its unwindings: 
they can know enough for the moment, enough to 
move with the main action. The final mystery in 
which all the discords will be resolved and all the tragic 
happenings be seen as part of the divine comedy can 
be left. 

It is at least man’s part to declare that, being what 
he is so far as he now can know the facts, he is not the 
sole master of his own thought and action. If he were 
of such character he knows that he would not feel as 
he does feel or think as he does think. 

But again: if, impressed by the thought of this Other 
who lays his hand upon him, man puts aside all belief 
in his own freedom, he may come to think of himself 
as an automaton. There are ingenious craftsmen who 
can make marionettes act as though they were intelli¬ 
gent human beings, so cleverly do they pull the strings. 
Man has often played with the thought that he is him¬ 
self a marionette pulled by celestial strings. He is 
nothing; God is all. God pulls his creatures here and 
there; of one he makes a king, of another a beggar, ac¬ 
cording to the demands of his plot. When the play 
is over the dolls are packed away in their box. They 
have known nothing about the play. They share 
neither in the tragedy nor in the comedy. 

But if man were this kind of creature would he be as 
he is today? If St. Francis had been a marionette, 
would he have been St. Francis as we know him? In 
one of his books Maurois pictures a moment when the 
marionettes begin to know the character of the plot in 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 109 

which they are playing; that is the end of their part as 
marionettes. That is precisely the position of man in 
the drama. He thinks, and he cannot help thinking 
what the drama means. Why? The moment the 
marionette begins to know that he is a marionette, he 
ceases to be one. If man were but a creature pulled by 
strings he would cease to be man. He would not be 
moved by the agonies or raptures which have visited 
him. The saints at least are clear about this. No less 
clear are the poets and prophets. 

No one who saw the play R.U.R. or heard it on the 
radio will forget the plot which has given the new 
word “ robot” to our language. Certain scientists 
made creatures who were able to do all the manual 
labor of the world; they were almost perfect machines. 
What caused the disaster which made these creatures 
masters of the world? One of the scientists by a clever 
experiment gave to them the sense of pain; they began 
to have an emotional life, and this at once made them 
cease to be machines. It is impossible for man, who 
suffers, to count himself only a marionette or a robot. 
If he were that he would not know pain or joy; but 
he does know pain and joy. If he were that he would 
not be troubled about the plot; but he does trouble 
about it. “ Oh that I knew where I might find him! 
That I might come even to his seat.” 

For the moment an appeal must be made to the 
facts as they are presented to us. We cannot give 
a final verdict. But there is at least reason for leaving 
open the possibility that we are neither self-directed 
nor pulled by strings. It is conceivable that while we 
seek and must seek with as much energy and courage 


no 


You Can Find God 

and patience as if everything depended upon us, at 
the same time an “ unweariable Adventurer ” is seek¬ 
ing for our souls. 

The evidence of the saints is important, and they 
speak for each man. They can speak where he is 
dumb. They have advanced further, but they are on 
the same road. A man may talk of himself as being 
a plain unemotional, practical, unspiritual individual. 
He may even explain away such religion as he once 
had; that looks to him now like the afterglow of a 
sun which has set not to rise again. But all the time 
the saints are there with their confident bearing, giving 
the lie to him. 

Nothing is more difficult than to discover what the 
ordinary man thinks about his own inner life, but it 
is wise to disregard his merely superficial account of 
himself. Very often his words are a smoke screen, 
deliberately set up to hide his real mind. Even such 
words as he uses confirm the suspicion that he has 
never escaped from the sense of the mystery of his 
own life. He may call his former beliefs only the by¬ 
products of adolescence, but when he is far removed 
from the realm of argument he cannot deny that those- 
experiences had at least the signs of reality. It is 
possible for a man to doubt in words the reality of 
all his inner life, the reality of its doubts and denials 
no less than of its faith. But he does not deceive us 
and he does not deceive himself; if there is any reality 
anywhere it was known to him that night when the 
pleading of an inspired voice awakened echoes in that 
innermost region in which man knows that he is most 
himself. 

There is a passage in Saul in which Browning de- 


Ill 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 

scribes such a man in such an hour of spiritual awaken¬ 
ing. David had found in his love for Saul the King 
a clue to the love of God for man: 

“ I know not too well how I found my way home in the 
night. 

There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and 
to right, 

Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the 
aware: 

I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strug- 
glingly there. 

As a runner beset by the populace famished for 
news — 

Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell 
loosed with her crews; 

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled 
and shot 

Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I 
fainted not, 

For the Hand still impelled me at once and sup¬ 
ported, suppressed 

All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet and holy 
behest, 

Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth 
sank to rest.” 

That is poetry, and therefore some readers will view 
it with suspicion. But because it is poetry, it is there¬ 
fore the truth about ourselves. Let it be read as a 
record of that exaltation which comes at one time 
or other to every man. Is it right to call it unreal 
although a thousand other experiences have made us 
forget it or be false to it? 


112 


You Can Find God 

When St. Augustine — to quote him once more — 
recalled his own youth he said, “ But was it life, O my 
God? ” When we go over our memories of the past, 
where do we discover that which we can best call life? 

It is always possible and sometimes easy to explain 
these inner experiences as if they could be accounted 
for by the physical conditions under which they oc¬ 
curred, and without doubt the physical has its place 
in the explanation. But when we have studied these 
causes and allowed for them, we are still left in mystery. 
Let us illustrate. 

If a mouse lived within the case of a piano he might 
see the hammers fall and, after certain movements 
of these hammers, might perceive certain sounds to 
follow. If he were a speculative mouse he might seek 
the explanation of the sounds. It might even be 
contended by one mouse that these hammers gave a 
complete explanation of the sounds; and he would 
not be wrong. But on the other side there is the player 
whose striking the keys makes the hammers move 
and the music sound. It is perfectly true that the 
fall of the hammer goes with the sound, but that alone 
does not account for the sound; if the sounds were with¬ 
out relation to one another they might be explained by 
the movement of a dog over the keyboard. But if 
there were any ordered grouping of the sounds it 
would not be possible to explain them by the me¬ 
chanical movements which could be seen. If the 
hammers were playing a prelude of Bach it would 
not be possible to explain the sounds by the casual 
pressure of keys. Some player must be there who 
has learned the master's work, and behind him we 
see the master himself, living still in the work 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 113 

upon which he impressed his mind. We hear the 
sounds; we know the mechanical causes; but there 
is a master who makes the music. 

This is only an imperfect illustration, as all illustra¬ 
tions in this field must be; but at least it suggests how 
we may miss the real explanation of those thoughts 
and aspirations which visit us in our inner life. They 
can be explained by the immediate conditions — our 
range of vision, the things which we have seen and 
heard, even the state of our health — but all the time 
there is Another, hidden from us, whose hand alone 
can supply the secret of our life, whose voice alone can 
give the reason for those echoes which reverberate in 
the soul. That knocking which we hear will not be 
explained till the door is opened and the Lord himself 
is seen standing there. “ Behold he stands at the 
door and knocks.” 

By this it is not meant that we should blindly de¬ 
cide to accept the explanation that our experiences 
are what they are because of the divine hand's pressure 
upon us. But there is at least good reason for saying 
that the door is not closed to the belief that we have 
other entrances into the soul than those which we 
can explain as originating in ourselves. We can at 
least say that there is a case to be heard. Witnesses 
can be called to tell us whether or not, in their own 
judgment, they were what they were because of the 
approach to them of a divine Seeker. 

Three witnesses may be called. First is the prophet. 
What is true of one is true of all the prophets; they 
confess with one voice that they were called and chosen 
by a heavenly Power. God speaks and they answer. 
“ The Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy? ” 


114 You Can ^md Cod 

So Amos cried in the wilderness of Tekoa. And in the 
opening of the book of Isaiah we read the story of a 
call which prompted that noble statesman and prophet 
through the long years of his life: “ In the year that 
King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord high and lifted 
up, and his train filled the temple. . . . Also I heard 
the voice of the Lord God saying unto me. . . .” 

Isaiah was sought. Of that he was sure as he was 
of nothing else. “Dreamer! Visionary! ” we cry. But 
there was no man in Jerusalem who could read as he 
read the signs of his times, no man who was more 
fearless a realist. He became a statesman before whom 
kings trembled in their intrigues, in whose presence 
the little and cunning politicians of Jerusalem seemed 
blind cowards. Through a long life he was sustained 
by that vision which was given to him. He was always 
a man who had been called and commissioned; the 
voice had come to him first of all and he had answered; 
God spoke first. 

The poets bear witness to the same truth. In the 
moments in which they were most themselves they 
were held by the hands of Another. They say as the 
psalmist said: 

“ Nevertheless I am continually with thee. 

Thou has holden me by my right hand, 

Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel 
And afterwards receive me to glory.” 

There are other voices calling man. They may lead 
him to his own undoing. There are sirens seeking 
to entice him as they enticed Ulysses and his men. 
Still there are voices calling the unsatisfied heart of 
man. Titan as he is, star-measurer, he “ makes, but 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 115 

half-aware of what he makes/' Man is striving with 
himself, 

“ He burns with the old need onward still to strain, 
Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting/'* 

And for him there waits the undiscovered country. 
The end of his adventures has not come. There are 
still wonders and glories to be sought, and still out of 
the silence and the unknown there is One who seeks 
and draws his spirit and will not leave him. 

Here is man, his heart so hardly taught. Of him 
eternity has need. For him a Lover, an unweariable 
Adventurer makes his quest. And now he can face all 
the storms that beat upon him. He will not fail in the 
end, whatever comes. 

“ He that has so loved peril in all experience. 

He that has followed sorrow all her way. 

Will not now refuse or shrink; prove him to the 
uttermost, 

With worse than worst confront him! " 

In such an hour he will stand forth greater in his naked¬ 
ness, for there are “ powers from far that replenish 
him," and this is his security. He is not alone and 
can never be forsaken. And with this faith he can 
move into the undiscovered world. 

“ Dawning beyond knowledge, vision shall deliver him 
From all that flattered, threatened, soiled, betrayed. 
Lo, having nothing, he is free of all the universe, 
And where light is, he enters unafraid." 

* No nobler poem has been written on this subject than “ The 
Sirens” by Laurence Binyon. (Collected Poems , Macmillan.) 


n6 You Can Find God 

This is the ancient and undying belief of man, that 
there is Someone seeking him. The mystics have 
never doubted it. They have known that the one 
way to fly from God is to fly to him. 

“When we could not fly from Thee anywhere 
We fled to Thee." 

They have told of the Hound of Heaven. They have 
likened life to a game of hide-and-seek in which it ap¬ 
pears sometimes as though man were hiding from his 
God who seeks him, and at other times as though man 
were seeking and God were hiding his face. 

But it may well be that the poet speaks most surely 
to our condition when he tells us, with all the wealth 
of his imagination, that we belong indeed to a race 
that seeks, but that this is not the last word: we be¬ 
long to a race that is sought. Upon this we rest our 
hope. Through all things in the heavens and in the 
earth moves that mighty Lover in quest of us. And 
we can move onward, sure that man is not the victim 
of any delusion or wild surmise when he obeys the 
voices. 

It is not for the poet to turn his theme into the 
language of religion. But others may seek to trace 
what in the Christian faith it is that corresponds to 
the poet's belief that man is the seeker who is sought. 
Certainly this conviction lies at the very heart of 
Christian truth. In the language of theology it is 
the doctrine of grace. It is the very secret of the in¬ 
carnation — that God sought man and gave his Son. 
We love because God first loved us. No one can read 
the New Testament without finding everywhere this 
daring, “ heart-shattering ” belief. 


The Seeker Who Is Sought 117 

Sometimes in the religious life the stress is laid 
upon the seeking of man. There have been and still 
are teachers who will put all the emphasis upon the 
quest from the human side. There are others who 
begin with the quest of God. For them man is a being 
dearly loved and sought. They think of him as re¬ 
deemed and called into the divine life. All around 
him and surging within him are the mighty powers 
of grace, of divine love in action. Man is both — 
seeker and sought. But he is first of all — the sought. 

To seek, if that were all, would be a hard and un¬ 
profitable task. What chance of finding would there 
be! To be sought, if that were all, would be an ex¬ 
perience but little worth. The Christian truth is that 
man is sought, but that he also must seek, earnestly 
and diligently, as if all depended upon him. But first 
comes the assurance from our Lord and his apostles 
that man is sought; not that he loves, but he is loved. 
Then the seeking and the adventure follow. 

There is more than a technical difference here. 
Much of our religious life is fitful and ineffective be¬ 
cause there is wanting at the heart of it the assurance 
that we are not left to ourselves, nor are we friendless 
in the eternal world. For there is comfort and patience 
and hope in the knowledge that our redemption and 
our eternal life are not our concern alone. 

Christian hearts, indeed, will declare that they know 
who is that unweariable Adventurer who makes his 
quest of them. There is only one better experience 
than to be sought; it is to be found. And if we are 
seeking and he is seeking, the finding must follow 
soon or late. 


IX 


WAYS IN WHICH HE MAY FIND US 


Where was thy body, so broken for me. 

Lord, my Lord? 

When didst thou shed thy blood for me, 

Jesus, Lord? 

Has it never been broken on any tree, 

Since they lifted thee down from Calvary? 

Have thy wounds been stanched since Calvary, 
Lord, my Lord? 

“ Here is my body, still broken for thee. 

Soul, my soul; 

Now I am shedding my blood for thee. 

Soul for soul; 

While they grind the corn in the mill for me. 

While they tread the grapes for a sign of me, 

I am broken and bleeding for love of thee. 

Soul, my soul.” 

IF IT were said to someone seeking for God that 
he should seek him in church he might lift his eye¬ 
brows with surprise. In church! What is there to 
be found in church? 

Earlier in this book the church has been considered 
from the side of the human seeker. But it may be 
also considered as a way in which the Lord is waiting 
to meet with us. It has a place in our lives; has it a 
place also in his? 

We shall be wise to visit and indeed to haunt the 

118 




Ways in Which He May Find Us 119 

places in which God is to be found. Even if we can 
say no more than that he has been reported in those 
places, we shall not neglect them. 

The church is called the Church of Christ; it is at 
the same time a society of human beings, bearing the 
marks of human folly and ignorance and sin. Can the 
two things be said of the same society? Where if any¬ 
where are we to look for the body of Christ in which 
he can still be found? 

It is indeed in living men and women if anywhere 
that we must look for the continuous life of the church 
of Christ. It is not to any invisible church that we 
must look. What use is it to tell us while we are in 
this world of time and space that we may find God in 
some ideal society which has no relation to the so¬ 
ciety in which we spend our days? 

If we are told that we may find Christ in the church 
we take that to mean in the church as it is known 
to us today, not in any invisible society. We must 
understand by it individual churches, not first of all 
“ Mount Zion and the innumerable company of 
angels and the church of the firstborn who are in 
heaven/' That also is ours in promise but it cannot 
give us what we need now and here. Here the diffi¬ 
culty arises. Can we expect that God will seek for us 
in these societies as we know them? 

We may think for encouragement of the problem 
that faced St. Paul when, for example, he lived, as 
he did for some time, in Corinth. He was walking, 
let us say, one first day of the week to the meeting 
place of the first disciples in Corinth when he met a 
rabbi of friendly disposition with whom he stopped to 
talk. 


120 


You Can Find God 

What do you expect to find when you meet with 
your new friends? ” the rabbi asked. “ Are they all 
men and women of holy character in whose faces the 
eternal Light shines? ” 

“ Not in the least,” St. Paul answered. “ They are 
of all kinds. They are weighed down by their past 
sins. They are sensual, self-willed, quarrelsome, even 
vicious. But how am I different from them? And 
there is another side. In their lives I see a new life 
beginning. It is as though I stand at the dawn of a 
new day. In that upper room I expect to find the first¬ 
born of a new world.” 

“ What do you mean by finding Christ there? ” 

“ Christ for me is not one man to be separated from 
all who belong to him. Where he is there are his 
members. Where his members are there he is. And 
these are his members. What they are now anyone 
can see. What they are to be only the eye of God 
can see. But we have prophecies and promises and 
in them we can see God. You see why I am going 
to meet with God.” 

Is that experience outside our range today? Is it 
enough to say, as many do, that the church is un¬ 
worthy of its name and they are wiser who seek other 
ways into the secret of the universe? 

There was a well known writer who explained in his 
youth that he did not go to church because he did 
not want to set a bad example. And if we set our¬ 
selves above others and despised them we might agree 
that to go to church with them was no way for us. 
We shall certainly find in church a company at one in 
this: that they are weak and tempted and sinful. But 
who are we to separate ourselves from them? Some 


121 


Ways in Which He May Find Us 

of our dislike for them may be due to taste; like others, 
we mistake refinement for holiness. But, as the apostle 
said, we are “ one in Adam.” The fact that we shall 
pass the hour of worship with others who are very 
much like ourselves is no reason for staying away from 
church, nor does it provide a ground for the suspicion 
that we shall not find God waiting there and God there 
in those very imperfect human beings. 

We may begin with the people assembled. We take 
our place among them. They and we are dealing in a 
greater or less degree with the same mysterious realities. 
Our personalities, like sensitive plates, are exposed to 
the same vision. We are assembled to listen to the 
same voice. And there is some response, however 
little, in every hearer. And in those responses we find 
God. 

I heard of a man who had no taste for classical music, 
and when one day for some reason he went to a concert, 
he sat there hoping that the time would pass quickly. 
Suddenly he looked at the face of a man to whom 
the glory of that music was revealed. In his eyes he 
saw a light which he had not known before. So it may 
happen that in the face of someone near you in church 
you may see a light not yet known to you. That one 
does not know of the light (the less he knows of it the 
better), but you do. 

Can we forget that mysterious reality which the 
New Testament calls the communion of the Holy 
Spirit? This is one way in which we can experience it. 
Communion means having and enjoying something 
in common. It is not as though we had come to a 
common meal to which each of us, as at a picnic, had 
brought his own portion. The communion of the 


122 


You Can Find God 

Holy Spirit does not mean that a number of men and 
women come together to pool all their good thoughts 
and desires. It is not a meeting of a cooperative so¬ 
ciety. On the contrary, it is a sharing together in 
the thing which is given by the one Lord and dis¬ 
tributed to each man as he has need and as he has 
capacity to understand and to receive the gift. So 
when we go to church we do not go to do the other 
people good by any excellence of our own. We are 
going to learn what can be learned by the members 
of a company all of whom, varied as they are, have 
exposed their spirit to the one word and the one action 
of the living God. 

He draws near; he speaks; he acts. But the word 
of this living God is not understood till it is answered. 
The answer belongs to the word itself. The word 
is not spoken into the air. The word of God does 
not return empty, but it accomplishes the thing to do 
which it is sent; and until it accomplishes this the 
word is not perfectly fulfilled. What that word in 
Christ accomplishes is seen in the eyes of those who 
are listening. Still more will it be seen in their lives. 
To be with them is to be in the presence not only 
of the word, but of the answer to the word; and there 
also is Almighty God. 

The very building, to one who uses his imagination, 
is rich in the memory of others who in that same place 
once sought and found God. There can be no such 
thing as an empty church. The ancient cathedrals 
are filled with the generations of the faithful dead. 
If we go to Assisi we do not count it deserted or solitary. 
St. Francis is there still to the inward eye. In the 
church to which we go we can find the silence filled 


Ways in Which He May Find Us 123 

with other voices. We can know how God was once 
with them and how they made their answer, though in 
other language and oppressed by other burdens than 
those which we carry. They live still because of all 
that they received from their God, and being in him 
they can never die. Through them he still comes to us. 

He meets us in his Word. 

That God speaks to us in his Word is the faith of 
all Christian people, but if they are invited to explain 
how he speaks they do not agree. Sometimes they 
make a sharp distinction between the human element 
and the divine. They call upon us to decide on which 
side we are to take our stand. They say that the 
Bible is either human or divine. But why should we 
accept this “ either ... or ”? 

Such a word must indeed be human: what other 
language could be used in speaking to men? There 
may be a myriad of tongues spoken in the eternal 
world; but only a human word can reach man in this 
present life. To treat the word as human is essential. 
We might argue that it is impossible that the eternal 
God should use words at all; words are not the only 
means of communication. But words that are at once 
communications meant for man, and also in no lan¬ 
guage known to man, are impossible to conceive. 

If words are human, they are subject to the con¬ 
ditions in which human beings use words. They can¬ 
not be kept out of the province of grammarian or 
historian or student of literature. Words so exempted 
would no longer be of any value as a means of com¬ 
munication to us. 

But, being human, they do not cease to act as a way 


124 You Can Find God 

of approach from God to the mind of man. If they 
are human, it does not mean that they can be under¬ 
stood without any reference to God. We cannot say 
that we know all about this human book and need no 
recourse to God. If the words can be explained 
without the belief that a divine voice is speaking 
through them, then we must accept the fact, and with 
it the loss of all that made life glorious. But why 
must we say that we understand all that a word means 
because it is human? Why so hastily assume that 
words can be explained without mystery? It is not 
as though we could contrast self-explanatory unmysteri- 
ous words such as we use with the mysterious message 
of the eternal Lord. We are in reality handling some¬ 
thing mysterious whenever we deal with words. All 
words are mysterious. There are no “ mere words.” 

When therefore we enter upon the reading of the 
Holy Scriptures, because we know that they are in 
human form we must not shut our minds to the 
possibility that God may be waiting to meet us there. 
We need not choose between reading the Bible as 
we read other books, and some other way; we may read 
it as we do other books and, as Bishop Westcott 
confessed, we may find in it what is not to be found in 
any other book. 

There was a noble passage in an address given by 
Peter T. Forsyth, a profound thinker of our times: 

Or I read the story of the father who beseeches 
Christ to heal his son. I hear the answer of 
the Lord, “ I will come down and heal him.” 
“ Him! ” That means me. The words are life to 
mv distempered soul. I care little for them (when 


Ways in Which He May Find Us 125 

I need them most) as a historic incident of the 
long past, an element in the discussion of miracles. 
They do not serve their divinest purpose till they 
come to me as they come to that father. They 
come with a promise here and now. I see the 
heavens open, and the Redeemer at the right 
hand of God. I hear a great voice from heaven, 
and these words are the words of the Saviour 
himself to me, “ I will come down and heal 
him.” And upon these he rises from his eternal 
throne, he takes his way through a ready line of 
angels, archangels, the high heavenly host and 
the glorious fellowship of the saints. They part 
at his coming, for they know where he would go. 
These congenial souls do not keep him, and these 
native scenes do not detain him. But on the 
wings of that word he moves from the midst of 
complete obedience, spiritual love, holy intelli¬ 
gence, ceaseless worship and perfect praise. He 
is restless in the midst of all that in search of me 
— me sick, falling, lost, despicable, desperate —. 
He comes, he finds, he heals me on the wings of 
those words. 

When in this way our Lord comes to us in his Word, 
we have not ceased to read the book as it comes in 
human speech, but we have found in it what it was 
meant to give. 

He seeks us in the holy communion. 

God seeks us in that sacrament to which many names 
are given. It is the holy communion, the eucharist, 
the Lord's Supper, the breaking of bread. Nothing is 


126 You Can Find God 

gained by disguising the differences of belief which 
such words describe. Yet, since this book is not meant 
to be more than a piece of first aid, it is right to show 
wherein all Christian people agree when they take 
this sacrament. 

All agree that whatever may be the fitting approach 
to worship at other times, in this hour it is one of 
waiting and receptivity. At other times the worshiper 
may be called to struggle, to fight, to wrestle; here he 
must expose his whole spirit to the presence and power 
of Another who is drawing near. He seeks, for he must 
always seek; but the master thought of his mind now 
is that he is being sought, and all that he has to do 
is to remove what may hinder the coming of his Lord. 
He enters into this scene desirous only that he may 
not miss the quickening and life-giving experience 
which is offered to him. 

The given-ness of the Christian religion; the grace 
of it; the priority of Christ — these truths, never to be 
forgotten, are here set forth. The Catholics, and the 
Brethren who break bread on the first day of the week, 
are poles apart in many of their beliefs, as they are 
in their methods of worship. But they agree that they 
do not win anything for themselves, nor do they pro¬ 
vide for themselves the substance of the feast. They 
have nothing which they have not received. They 
use the same words: “ Take, eat; this is my body which 
is given for you.” There is no escape from the truth 
that in the eucharist or at the Lord's table, wherever 
men keep the Lord's death and feed upon him by 
faith, they are not seekers first of all, but the sought. 
They do not find, they are found. 

There is always the earthward side of an act of com- 


Ways in Which He May Find Us \irj 

munion. It may be a poor and mean exterior to which 
the worshiper comes. The bread has been grown in 
the earth and ground in the mill. The words spoken 
are not magical with a power to evoke mysterious and 
hidden forces. The origin of the rite, whatever form 
it may take, can be told by students of history. Why 
bring in God? 

No answer can be complete except in experience. 
The seeker after God must be ready to make experi¬ 
ments upon the evidence of others. Here is a rite 
which obviously has a human side. Why is it that 
the thing which is obvious to us has not been obvious 
to others no less able to see clearly, no less honest 
than we are? It should be at least conceivable that 
the case is not so complete as we think when we rob 
such a feast or celebration of its mystery. We may 
be perfectly right in our explanation of the earthly 
setting, and at the same time we may be missing 
something which shines through that and is found in 
it. It may be a very mean thing, and at the same time 
the upper room into which the Lord comes to eat 
the passover with us. That upper room in Jerusalem 
was like other rooms; the materials for the feast were 
like others provided that night; the disciples were a 
small company of Galileans who had come to Jerusa¬ 
lem with their Master. Yet when we think of that 
upper room we see a glory which shines upon it from 
an unseen world. Into that room there enters One 
who transfigures it, and he brings his gifts with him. 

Imagine that this may be true still. That sacrament 
which is celebrated may have its inner side, from which 
a glory may break through to illuminate all things. 
It is at least a possibility which ought not to be dis- 


128 You Can Find God 

missed. Certainly over against it we have no right 
to set the poverty of its outward scene, its lowly and 
even shabby surroundings. We must face the claim 
that the sacrament may be the means whereby the 
imprisoned glory of the Lord may break upon the soul. 

In his great eucharist hymn St. Thomas wrote: 

“ Therefore we, before Him bending, 

This great sacrament revere; 

Types and shadows have their ending 
For the newer rite is here: 

Faith, our outward sense befriending, 

Makes the inward vision clear.” 

Charles Wesley wrote: 

“ Jesu, we thus obey 

Thy last and kindest word, 

Here in thine own appointed way 
We come to meet our Lord.” 

Both agree that in this feast the soul comes to meet 
with the unseen Lord, and through the outward sense 
to have the inward vision made clear. Here the wit¬ 
nesses agree. 

They agree no less in their belief that it is the 
Redeemer, who died and rose again, who comes to 
meet the soul of man. Some serious thinkers may be 
content to treat Jesus as a teacher whose words are 
worthy of being repeated to all the successive gener¬ 
ations of men. They call together their fellows to 
read these words for their wisdom and beauty and 
grace. They lay no stress on the fact that he who 
spoke these words died on the cross. What he did 


Ways in Which He May Find Us 129 

in act appears to them to belong to the past; the 
words only remain. But it is altogether impossible 
to believe in the sacrament unless in it the Saviour who 
redeemed men with his precious blood draws near, 
mighty still to save and to hold the soul. 

As a matter of history this sacrament has never 
been separated from the thought of Christianity, as 
a religion not of enlightenment only, but of redemp¬ 
tion. He who offers himself in such a fashion can¬ 
not be a teacher whose words only are to be revered. 
Why should men eat bread and drink wine to com¬ 
memorate the words of a teacher? If this were the 
meaning of these signs they would be singularly un¬ 
fitting, and even misleading. 

Whatever varied meanings we may read into the 
words which we hear, “This is my body, . . . this 
is my blood,” to every serious thinker they must have 
something to do with the Redeemer who has done 
an act of divine and eternal significance and done it 
for them, for me. In a sacrament there is of ne¬ 
cessity an act remembered and prolonged. 

The people of Christ agree, wherever they keep the 
feast, that it is the Lord as the dying Redeemer for 
whom they look. It is he who seeks the soul in that 
hour. 

Seeks! This is no dead hero whose deeds we keep 
alive. Whatever else a sacrament means, it cannot 
mean merely that. On the level of our present life we 
children of time and space go forth to meet One who 
still can do for the soul all that he has ever done. 
His dying was at one moment in history, yet it re¬ 
vealed and made effective on this earthly scene in 


130 You Can Find God 

every age till the end the eternal love of God. The 
soul waits to meet One who in his cross commends 
his own changeless and inexhaustible love to us. 

What does he offer? It may be put in many ways. 
But all the figures and images, all the types and sym¬ 
bols, mean this: The Redeemer giving to men thinking, 
willing, loving, his own life, so that they can say, “ I 
live, and yet not I but Christ liveth in me.” His life, 
which has passed through death, is given to the waiting 
soul in its hunger. This is meant to show that it is no 
legal acquittal which is offered to us, but a new birth 
and a new life. Men have been tempted to read into 
the Christian religion the figures of law, or of com¬ 
merce, or of earthly tyrannies. But always this sacra¬ 
ment has been a protest against such limitation. It 
compels us to think of life and the nourishment of 
life. “ Feed on him by faith in your hearts. Drink, 
. . . this is the blood of the new covenant.” So he 
seeks for us here in this sacred meeting place. 

He seeks, but he is the Lord of a people who comes 
to us. He does not come as One who can be known 
and received apart from his body, the church. This 
sacrament is always a protest against an individual 
piety which shrinks from its part in the fellowship. 
It is an act of social worship, not the lonely ecstasy 
of the soul. There are hours in which the soul may 
be alone with the Redeemer, as Mary was with Jesus 
in the garden on the first Easter day. “ Rabboni! ” 
we may still cry with that personal bond for our own. 
But he does not come thus to seek for us in the 
sacrament; there he is one with his people; when he 
died they died with him; that body, the church, was 
there at Calvary, and is there forever with him. 


Ways in Which He May Find Us 131 

He is in that way. We must go forth to meet him 
there. 

In the way of surrender and obedience. 

“ The chapter is long,” a friend remarked, “ but it 
cannot end without some account of another way in 
which he may find us. I want somewhere in the book 
to read the words of our Lord: 4 He that hath my 
commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth 
me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, 
and I will love him and will manifest myself to him/ 
Is not that a way in which we may expect to find him? 
He will manifest himself.” 

“ That is true,” I answered, 44 and though it may 
be implied everywhere, it must be said definitely and 
underlined; and long as the chapter is, it must not 
end without this promise to the seeker.” 

There may come an hour in which we are deeply 
impressed by the call of the Saviour to the life which 
we see so perfectly in him. We recognize his as the 
noblest life. But as yet we cannot say that we know 
him as St. Paul came to know him, or St. Francis. 
Are we to wait then till he has manifested himself 
to us, and then go out to keep his commandments 
and serve him in our love to one another? That 
does not seem to be the right order, if we listen to 
his words. He would rather tell us to make experi¬ 
ments if we would come across his path. 44 Faith 
begins as an experiment, and ends as an experience.” 
He would bid us surrender ourselves to him, rise up 
and follow him, and so set out upon the way along 
which he will meet with us and manifest himself to us. 

We should remember other words of the Saviour 


132 You Can Find God 

spoken in the same hour: “ If a man serve me, let him 
follow me, and where I am there shall also my servant 
be.” Some serve without following; but the true way 
is to follow. And what happens to the follower? He 
discovers himself in new and unexpected ways in the 
presence of his Lord, where he is. 

In surrender to that which calls to us and claims 
us, and in treading the way of obedience, we may find 
him or be found by him. 

The words of Dr. Schweitzer, so wonderfully veri¬ 
fied in his experience, will be verified also in ours: 

Jesus came to us as One unknown, without a 
name, as of old by the lakeside he came to those 
who knew him not; he speaks to us the same 
words, “ Follow me,” and sets us the tasks which 
he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. 
And to those who obey him, whether they be 
wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, 
the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass 
through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable 
mystery they shall learn in their own experience 
who he is. 

It is a simple counsel to give. We may grow im¬ 
patient with it, and ask for some more distant road 
to take and some more difficult task to do. But here 
the way lies at our very door, and we may take it 
without waiting. It is the way of loving obedience. 
There he will meet us and manifest himself to us, 
as he has promised. 


X 


THE JUDGE WHO COMES TO MEET US 


His love will seek in thee till death 
A Bethlehem and Nazareth; 

He climbs the hills of Galilee 
And marches to the cross in thee; 

Thou art the garden where he lies, 

In thee the third day he will rise; 

Rejoice, great soul, when morn shall break, 

And leave thee sleeping, he will wake. 

THAT God comes into our life in Christ, seeking us, 
is a truth at the heart of the Christian religion. The 
good news which was believed and preached from the 
beginning was this very thing — God had come, and 
anywhere and at any time those who looked for him 
might see him. 

But he could only be seen in his own character and 
purpose. That could not be changed to meet the 
demands of the seeker. He might have had another 
character and visited men for another purpose. The 
same word, “ God,” has been used in many senses. 
But he did come to redeem his people, and they who 
would look with him might find him, but only as their 
Redeemer. 

If he had been a mathematician those who would 
follow his way would have certain conditions to ful¬ 
fill; they would need at least to be austere and dis¬ 
interested lovers of truth. 


133 




134 You Can Find God 

If he could only be likened to an artist, such as 
sought him would need at least an eye quick to answer 
to beauty. 

The God who seeks us in Christ is the God of 
truth and beauty, and in the search for him every 
noble instinct of the spirit of man has its function; 
but he is first of all holy Love, and the seeker must be 
ready for an encounter with such a Being. It must 
make a difference if we have to do with such a One. 
When therefore the good news was carried abroad 
that God had visited his people, there went with it the 
word that those who wanted to find him must re¬ 
member what kind of God he was. They were on 
the track not of some God, but of this God. 

He might come; he might be near at hand; he might 
be speaking; but whether the children of men saw 
him or not depended upon their own readiness for 
him. He had answered their needs, but they must be 
conscious what their needs were if the answer was 
to reach them; to others his words and his acts would 
be unknown. 

Not first of all to man saying, “ Give me truth ”; 
not to man saying, “ Give me beauty,” did he come, 
but to man saying, “ Give me goodness, give me love.” 
If that was so, the search for him must be the search 
of a moral being. Not to man as an intellectual ex¬ 
plorer, not to man as an artistic creator, but to man who 
had come to know where he had failed and grieved 
his God had the Lord of the World come. 

This search of man has one condition. Before a 
man can find his Lord he must be prepared to meet 
him in judgment. The day when the soul finds this 
Lord must be for it a day of judgment. 


The fudge Who Comes to Meet Us 135 

No one who is at all sensitive to the mind of his 
fellows in the present hour will expect anything but 
a cold reception of any talk of judgment. The word 
belongs to an ancient vocabulary which to them has 
no longer any place in the modern world. There are 
many reasons why the thoughtful mind revolts against 
some of the crude and terrible pictures of judgment 
which Christians have thrown upon the screen of the 
future. Man has read his own basest passions and 
lusts into the character of God. He has represented 
him as a torturer to whom the devices of the earthly 
torturer are by comparison merciful. But man's folly 
must not make us hastily dismiss the truth which his 
misunderstanding has caricatured. There is written 
on the conscience and mind of man the certainty of 
judgment, and we do not rid ourselves of that cer¬ 
tainty by showing how the children of men have let 
their own bitterness and hatred run riot in their pic¬ 
ture of their Lord. The judgment seat is not as the men 
of the past saw it. But there is and there must be a 
judgment seat. 

If the moral life is anything but a delusion there 
must be judgment. Otherwise there would be a sow¬ 
ing and no harvest; a process which has no finish; 
history with no significance; drama without plot. We 
may dismiss judgment from our thoughts, but if we 
do so we must also dismiss the reality of the moral 
life. We lose the great tragedies of the world, but 
we lose also the New Testament; and not simply the 
Epistles, but the Gospels. St. Paul, it is true, reasoned 
with Felix concerning judgment; but Jesus, no less, 
told of the hour when the Son of Man should come in 
his glory and all the holy angels with him. And in 


136 You Can Find God 

the very important words in John our Lord says of 
his cross, “ Now is the judgment of this world/' 

That expectation of judgment to which the spirit 
of man bears witness is confirmed in the gospel. Those 
who enter into the story of the gospel cannot meet 
with Christ without finding him their judge — the 
hour in which they stand before him will be the hour 
of judgment. You never read the Gospels till for 
you that judgment becomes a present reality. 

As the eye adjusts itself to the Gospels it becomes 
fixed upon Christ crucified, and there it remains. Not 
that in the hour of the cross he took another part, 
that the one who had been before the ethical teacher 
or the sympathetic healer became now for the first 
time the Lord of judgment. In all the revelation of 
his life he judged men: the first response to the good 
news was repentance. But all the earlier scenes in the 
story are gathered up in this one last act in which our 
Lord gave himself to men. Having loved his own 
which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. 
In that end all that he had been could be read in 
letters of fire. But though the hour of the cross was 
in a distinctive sense the hour of judgment, when 
men remembered Jesus they remembered always that 
to enter into his presence at any time was to come into 
an experience of that very judgment of the cross. Of 
judgment they had heard from the prophets, and there 
had been a foretaste of that very hour in their own 
hearts. It was in one sense a new experience to meet 
with Jesus; in another sense they had been prepared 
for it all their lives. 

To understand what judgment means here we do 
well to dismiss from our minds the analogy of the 


The Judge Who Comes to Meet Us 137 

magistrates' court, or the Old Bailey. There an of¬ 
fender is brought to book by the quotation of laws 
which he has broken. He is made to see his offense 
by measuring his conduct against the standard laid 
down by the laws of the society in which he lives. 
It may be that he is guilty merely of breaking some 
necessary regulation, but not any serious expression of 
the moral law. Or it may be that he is condemned 
for some act which is at once an offense against human 
society and against the Christian law. But he may 
not discover his inward guilt in the court at all. He 
meets judgment, but not judgment as we meet it in 
Christ. 

When Simon Peter came into the presence of his 
Lord, or when Mary anointed his feet with the precious 
ointment, they were judged, but not by any code or 
book of laws. Simon went out and wept bitterly 
because of something which he had seen in the eyes 
of Jesus. Mary anointed his feet because she had 
been forgiven much, and that forgiveness had been 
judgment for her. 

We shall come nearer to the understanding of this 
judgment if we think in the language of personal 
relationship. We must think of judgment in terms 
of human relationship. 

How, for example, is a musician to be judged? Auer 
was a great teacher of music in Leipzig. To that 
city came students of the violin from every land; they 
were already accomplished players, but they went to 
him as to a master in the highest reaches of their art. 
If we imagined one of them in the full tide of his 
career returning to the old master in after years, and 
playing to him, we can see what a day of judgment may 


138 You Can Find God 

mean. The player, famous it might be in the world's 
eye, would listen for the judgment of his teacher. 
There would be no need of words of condemnation. 
The player would read in the face of the old master 
where he had been faulty and where he had fallen 
from his old standards. 

In all human relationships there is an element of 
judgment. Where two human beings meet there 
must be an element of contrast as well as of affinity. 
The friend learns to know himself through the eyes 
of his friend; he becomes his other self. It is one of 
the most fatal errors to confuse the words “ individual " 
and “ personal." A person in reality becomes himself 
only in fellowship, in escaping from the individual 
life. “ Personality is a capacity for communion." 
In every relation between persons there is always 
something that brings them together and always some¬ 
thing that separates them. We discover what is lack¬ 
ing or wrong in ourselves when we see ourselves in 
contrast with another.* 

That is how conviction of sin may come. We used 
to hear more than we do today of these words. It 
was considered the first stage toward a new life that 
a soul must be made aware of sin and the “ exceeding 
sinfulness of sin." But the awareness must often 
have come by way of what has been called “ a con¬ 
viction of righteousness"; a man knew himself to 
be a sinner not because he measured himself against 
a book of instructions and regulations, but because 
he saw the other kind of life in some person whom he 
observed and admired. It is not any abstract con- 

* This idea has been admirably expounded in H. H. Farmer, 
God and the World . 


The fudge Who Comes to Meet Us 139 

ception of virtue that will awaken us; it is goodness 
and love as we see them expressed in some life. Indeed 
there is no goodness or love except as they are in¬ 
carnate. And if we are to be brought into judgment 
by the appeal of holiness, it will be through some 
person in whom the thing which we have missed or 
lost or betrayed is represented in flesh and blood. 

When we bear these things in mind we understand 
a little how it was that men in the presence of Jesus 
were judged. They saw him, and the sight made them 
see themselves. They knew their sin when they saw 
his goodness. They were unloving, he loved with a 
perfect love; they were self-centered, he lived a life 
centered in God; they were grudging in their devotion, 
he held nothing back; to them God was something, 
to him God was everything. 

More than codes or laws was needed to bring men 
to knowledge of themselves. More is needed still if 
we are to be brought to judgment. We do not think 
it surprising when we read that this same Lord went 
steadfastly to Jerusalem where as in a citadel his ene¬ 
mies waited for him. He must needs go, and go to 
judge the world. He exposed himself to them with 
no armor against their weapons. In the city he met 
with evil, but not such evil as could be discovered 
only once, never before and never after. The evil 
which was at work in Jerusalem was the evil which is 
always at work in human society. It is common to 
man; it is not strange to him. Our Lord had to deal 
with it in its full power. 

What was new and strange was the occasion for 
the revelation of that evil. That occasion was the 
coming of the Son of God in all his holiness. Not 


You Can Find God 


140 

by discourse upon virtue was the revelation made; 
through his own action in that hour the disguise was 
torn from evil. He —not his words only, but he 
himself in his action — made men see what it was that 
they lacked. Now was the judgment of the world. 

Judgment must mean revelation which strips evil 
of its disguises. The revelation which Jesus in his 
life had begun to make wherever he met with men 
and women was perfected in the hours upon the cross. 
There the evil principle of the world was shown in 
action. This, this was what the sin of man meant and 
had meant all through the ages. 

Two things are revealed in that moment: love and 
sin. They could only be revealed together. It was 
not as though an example had to be taken of man 
at his worst. There was nothing in that Syrian city 
that day which could not have been found in any 
city in any age. Indeed, if a comparison is to be made 
with other cities, Jerusalem perhaps might appear 
comparatively virtuous. Of the abiding gifts made 
by that ancient world to all time two stand out above 
all others: the religion of Israel and the law of Rome. 
Both were represented in Jerusalem. The agents by 
whom the crucifixion was planned were the men to 
whom these solemn trusts were committed; Caiaphas 
was the high priest of the temple, Pilate was the trustee 
of Roman law. And we cannot forget that Judas 
Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, was one of those who 
had been in his circle, who had gone out to preach 
the coming of the kingdom and to heal the sick in 
his name. Here were safeguards. The world had none 
better to offer. Why did they fail? 


The fudge Who Comes to Meet Us 141 

In such a scene the coming of the holy Son of God 
meant the hour of revelation; not of something wrong 
in law, or even in religion, but in human beings. 
Something had entered into human society which 
could never be attacked unless it was first laid bare. 
It could never be laid bare except as its power could 
be measured in its action upon a person; and only the 
most holy One could be the occasion for the unmask¬ 
ing of that evil. There were many philosophers in 
that day who could have analyzed the evil in human 
society, who could have exposed Pontius Pilate and 
Caiaphas and Judas. To this day scholars are ready 
to study in the school of Seneca, who was a contem¬ 
porary of Paul. Seneca would have seen through the 
motives of the actors of that day. The actors them¬ 
selves understood one another. Caiaphas played upon 
the weakness of Pilate who was held by the dead 
hand of his own past; Pilate saw that “ for envy ” the 
priests had given up Jesus to him. There was no lack 
of intellectual judgment. 

But if men were to know themselves without any 
disguises more was needed than the analysis made by 
wise men. They must see the meaning of their ac¬ 
tions not as the actions concerned their own indi¬ 
vidual lives, but as they were part of a great pattern. 
They must discover what they meant to the mind of 
the Lord of the World, who has a purpose for all 
mankind. What did men themselves do to him when 
he put himself in their power? If they could see the 
meaning of that action, written not in words but in 
deeds, not through someone who can understand the 
human standpoint only, but through someone who can 


You Can Find God 


142 

see things from the side of God, they might know a 
little what sin means. Not crime, nor folly, but sin. 
They might cry once more, “ Against thee, thee only 
have I sinned.” 

This recognition took place, and still takes place, 
when men are drawn to the cross. They come to that 
historic cross knowing that it symbolizes a miscarriage 
of justice, but they remain there with other thoughts. 
They see what the cross revealed of the principle of 
evil in the agents who sent Jesus to it. He was “ cruci¬ 
fied under Pontius Pilate all that this involved they 
begin to measure; but they know that there is more to 
be learned than an account of certain acts done in 
an eastern city long ago. To stand before the cross 
of Christ is a more personal experience than that; it 
is a day of judgment, not for Pilate, not for Caiaphas, 
but for you and me. 

You can find God in the cross; but he must be first 
of all the God who judges and reveals. It is in Christ 
crucified that the soul discovers the utmost limit of 
its own sin. The self-centeredness of the life which we 
are living cannot be easily perceived in the swift stream 
of events. If we are to be judged we must be helped 
to see the sin, so easily disguised, in the full measure 
of its power. Egoism seems a trifling charge for us 
to bring against ourselves; to understand its evils we 
must see it carried out to its last measure. What if 
that living for myself, that self-centeredness, is the 
sin which is at the root of the white slave traffic, 
sweated labor, the oppression of child races, war? To 
know my sin I must see it magnified on that vast 
scale; but even so I may not have entered deeply into 
the last realities. How can I see my life in its relation 


The fudge Who Comes to Meet Us 143 

to the eternal and holy God? Only, once more, as 
I am ready to face the contrast with myself, the per¬ 
fection embodied in the holy Son of God. That is 
one of the experiences to which the soul is exposed 
before the cross. 

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a 
holy God, in whose light we must seek to come to an 
understanding of ourselves as he must see us. It is 
not with ourselves as creatures of time, in contrast 
with his eternal life, that we are concerned, nor with 
ourselves as limited beings in the presence of the 
Infinite. God differs from us in that he is loving and 
we fail in love, he forgives and we are unforgiving. 
When he speaks to us his last word, it is in the life of 
One who, in his love, died for his own and for their 
sakes suffered all that needed to be borne to set them 
free. 

All that this sacrifice means we cannot know. Nor is 
it necessary to wait till we comprehend clearly how on 
his cross the Saviour bore our sins and carried our 
sorrows. There is truth in the lines of the hymn: 

“ But none of the ransomed ever knew 
How deep were the waters crossed.” 

We do not know, and cannot know, the death that he 
died. It is enough for us at the beginning of our new 
life that the light falls upon us, the searching light 
from the face of the Crucified. 

Judgment means revelation; but more than that: it 
means also destruction. God kills and makes alive. 
The judgment is not to be separated from the mercy 
of God. Judgment is mercy, even as wrath is the 
recoil of love from evil. The soul which is exposed to 


144 You Can ^ In( ^ God 

the revelation of evil has within it the secret of the 
destruction of evil. The One who meets us in the 
gospel is rich in mercy; if he were not, he would never 
let us know the terror of his love. “ The soul is con¬ 
sumed and quickened ” by him; consumed, or it could 
never be quickened; quickened by the love which will 
not spare it. 

But they who yielded to him passed out of that day 
of judgment into the riches of his love. One who 
knew what that experience meant said, “ There is 
therefore now no condemnation for them that are in 
Christ Jesus.” For him the judgment was over, and 
in all his experience, bitter as it had been, it was 
the same Lord who drew near to him. 

Judge because he was Saviour, Saviour because he 
was Judge. 

Like a solemn refrain of great music, the thought of 
his coming to us is repeated in the Scriptures; and he 
is always the same: 

“ The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 
which was lost.” 

"Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you.” 

“ The Son is come to give his life a ransom for 
many.” 

“ This is love, not that we loved God but that he 
loved us.” 

“ He loved me and gave himself for me.” 

“ Behold I stand at the door and knock.” 

This is the wonder of the gospel. But it must not 
be halved by us. We cannot read it as an offer of a 
reformation in human society or as tidings of a general 
amnesty. Rather is it first of all revelation, judgment, 
destruction. The answer to it is repentance, the ad- 


The Judge Who Comes to Meet Us 145 

justment of life to a new Lord. With this revelation 
there will come to the soul that will accept it de¬ 
liverance, forgiveness, peace. 

You can find God: but only such a God can be 
found. 



CAN SEEKERS FIND NOW ? 


Because the hinds have sought the brooks 
Through ages past, the panting hind 
Today for living water looks; 

They found, and she will find. 

Because the saints have sought, I seek 
For God in wildernesses dry, 

And since they found I, lost and weak, 

Shall find him ere I die. 

WE MUST seek, we shall find; but shall we find — 
now? Or is it characteristic of this life in time that 
we must spend it in seeking, and of the life beyond 
death that then for the first time we may find? This 
question has still to be answered. It is not a new 
question; it has been put and answered in various ways. 

The thinkers of the Middle Ages tried to reason 
out the character of the blessed life in paradise. They 
said that it was a life of attainment and peace. They 
used the word “ fruition/' In paradise the redeemed 
were at peace in the will of God. They were not 
striving for a higher place in some other circle of the 
heavenly company. They were no longer on pilgrim¬ 
age. The things that they had desired and striven to 
gain they now had. Their chief end was always to 
glorify God, now that they enjoyed him forever. 

146 




Can Seekers Find Now? 147 

There are moderns who do not reject this doctrine, 
but who find it unwelcome and almost unintelligible. 
They conceive of life always in terms of movement 
from good to better, on and always on; life for them is 
good for this very reason, that in it man seeks. And 
how can any life in which the struggle is over be 
attractive to them? They make a concession to tra¬ 
dition when they sing their hymns. They say of 
Jerusalem the golden: 

“ There is the throne of David, 

And there, from care released. 

The song of them that triumph. 

The shout of them that feast — ” 

but such a Jerusalem does not attract them as it did 
their fathers. They share the longing of the American 
general who hoped for a brief rest after death and 
then a new cry, “ Fall in for Jupiter! ” and once more 
he would arise and join the fighting men. 

Without doubt this was the accepted creed in the 
days, not long ago, when progress was not something 
men doubted or denied, but a dogma beyond all ques¬ 
tion. What was more natural than to picture the 
life of the spirit as a perpetual progress, to conceive 
of the soul as always seeking, never satisfied? Even 
when the eye sought to catch the outlines of the 
other life, it saw still a life of work in progress.* 

Men fell into the serious error of thinking of the 
life beyond death as a continuance of this life. Eter¬ 
nity became only an infinitely long time; and since 
they could not think of life on earth except in terms 

# Upon this subject there is an invaluable lecture by Philip 
Wicksteed, The Religion of Time and of Eternity. 


148 You Can Find God 

of movement, they could not picture its sequel as 
anything but the same, only prolonged. Much has 
come to shake that dogma of progress, and many have 
begun to inquire whether it is enough to think of 
life as a seeking only; whether there is not in the vision 
of eternity a place for fruition, and whether it is not 
given to man even here in time and within the limita¬ 
tions of time to End , as well as to seek. 

It is indeed doubtful whether the heart of man 
was ever satisfied with the idea that life was worth¬ 
less except as a scene of progress. Youth, in some 
leisurely discussion of such matters from a comfort¬ 
able armchair, may declare that the ideal life is one 
of ceaseless activity, but the charwoman is likely to 
think of it as a rest from toil. 

A religious life which is all seeking is not complete. 
It may become, at the worst, the life of one who is 
always sending his shoes to be repaired and never 
wears them. Perpetual “ progress ” may be little less 
than perpetual failure. 

The language of those who have a right to be heard 
on this matter is clear. Great Christians have told 
us of their desperate struggles and the agony of their 
seeking, but they have also told us how they entered 
into the joy of their Lord even here, and beyond death 
they looked to find all that joy crowned in the peace 
of God: 

“ I hope to see these things again, 

But not as once in dreams of night/' 

We may take their witness almost at random. St. 
Paul, at the end, looked for the crown of glory which 


Can Seekers Find Now ? 149 

his Lord had laid up for him, but even in this life he 
knew seasons of peace and had a foretaste of the 
blessed kingdom of God, whether in the body or out 
of the body he knew not. St. Augustine and his 
mother, Monica, knew one evening at Ostia what it 
meant to pass out of the tumults of time into the joy 
of the Lord. Bunyan beheld such a vision in the land 
of Beulah, and by faith followed his pilgrims into 
the city of God and heard the music and wished him¬ 
self among them. Oliver Cromwell wrote once to 
his daughter Bridget telling her that there was only 
one company happier than the seekers, and that was 
the finders. It has indeed been the witness of the 
people of God that they did find even in this life. Not 
everything, but something; not the thing itself in all 
its glory, but an earnest of it. 

No hint is given us in the New Testament of the 
way in which the two experiences are to be reconciled. 
If a reader declares impatiently, “ I cannot see how I 
can be both seeking and finding/' and demands a 
logical account of the life in which these two experi¬ 
ences are known together, he will ask in vain. Our 
Lord and his apostles do not hesitate to tell men that 
they must seek and go on seeking to the end, and yet 
that they can find even before they leave this earthly 
life. “ My joy I give unto you," the Lord has said; 
“ not as the world giveth give I unto you. . . . Peace 
I leave with you." 

In one of the greatest of all religious poems Chris¬ 
topher Smart wrote of the Christian inheritance: 

“ Where ask is have, where seek is find. 

Where knock is open wide." 


150 You Can Find God 

That is a true picture of the realm into which our 
Lord invites his disciples. They will most certainly 
find. 

When we consider the words of our Lord, we are 
amazed to discover how much is promised in them. 
We read, for example, the Beatitudes. We dwell much 
upon the life to which they call men — that wild, 
strange, topsy-turvy life in which all the accepted values 
of human society are reversed. We are startled by the 
thought that this sermon was probably given to those 
who were about to be baptized in the early church. 
If they asked, “ What kind of life shall we be called 
to live? '' their teachers would say, “ Listen to these 
words/' Men are instructed to be poor in spirit, meek, 
pure in heart, mourners, hungry and thirsty after right¬ 
eousness. They are challenged to live a life which is 
not merely a variation of the common life; they are 
to strike out on fresh ways, and they must not shrink 
from paying the price. 

As we read these words, we see those who accept 
them as a body of sufferers deprived of all that makes 
this human scene a place of happiness and wealth. 
We see them poor, outcast, exiled from the great 
human inheritance. All this they endure for their 
Lord's sake. They are seeking another country and 
for the present they must do without what others 
possess. We see them in the light of the things which 
they forfeit for the sake of their Lord. 

But are we doing justice to the plain meaning of 
the words of our Lord? He called these men “ happy 
he gave to them not only a call, but a perfectly defi¬ 
nite promise. It may be worth while to put these 
promises down in their order: 


Can Seekers Find Now? 151 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be 
comforted. 

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the 
earth. 

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness: for they shall be filled. 

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain 
mercy. 

Blessed are they which are persecuted for right¬ 
eousness" sake: for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and 
persecute you and say all manner of evil against 
you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceed - 
ing glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for 
so persecuted they the prophets which were be¬ 
fore you. 

This is a picture of these disciples not in some other 
sphere of life, but here in this realm of time and 
space. We see a number of men and women who 
have great treasures, wealth to be enjoyed beyond all 
the dreams of misers. Theirs is the realm of heaven: 
they are comforted; they inherit the earth; they hunger 
no more; they obtain mercy; they enter into the com¬ 
pany of the prophets and rejoice and are exceeding 
glad; they leap for joy. Clearly such disciples are not 
encouraged to look upon this life simply as a scene 
of conflict and loss; it is not in negatives that such a 
life can be fully described. The negative is clearly 
set down: there are ways which they may not tread; 


152 You Can Find God 

there are treasures which they cannot possess. But 
there is a gloriously positive future before them; and 
when they are called happy it is not simply in respect 
of their losses, but also because of the rich gains which 
they can have. As seekers they are happy, but they 
are happy also as finders. 

In their education for life a place of first importance 
is given to prayer. But prayer as our Lord interpreted 
it is not asking only, or seeking, or knocking. It is 
a real cooperation with God: real, not make-believe! 
The disciple is called to ask, and he shall receive; to 
knock, and the door shall be opened to him; to seek, and 
he shall End. 

In one of his many promises the Master said: “ Be 
of good cheer; in the world ye shall have tribulation, 
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” 
Here there is the same attempt to put side by side 
the two apparently contradictory experiences — tribu¬ 
lation, and triumph; pressed down by the world, lib¬ 
erated by the victorious Lord; bond, and free; dying, 
and behold they will live. The disciples have not to 
choose between two experiences. It is not as though 
some disciples were to endure affliction and others sing 
the song of victory; or as though in one mood a disciple 
would be cast down, and in another exalted. The 
much more difficult undertaking entered into by the 
Lord for his people is to make them both at the same 
time — hard-pressed, and free; in the grip of the world, 
and yet able to defy the world. The enemy will stand 
over them, and then, as Bunyan said, will come “ the 
sound of the silver trumpet and the trampling of the 
slain! ” 

To the tempted soul also there is promised the 


Can Seekers Find Now? 153 

same twofold life. Men will not know until the end 
cessation of conflict. There will never come a time 
when the soul will not need to watch. After his 
own temptations in the wilderness the Lord had peace, 
but only for a time. The tempter departed from him 
for a season. He himself left with his friends the 
counsel that they must watch and pray. St. Paul has 
left to all men the picture of human life as a battlefield 
in which the enemies are not flesh and blood, a field 
on which there is never a call to stand at ease. Having 
overcome, stand — ready for the next attack! 

Yet to the same souls, set in the midst of foes, there 
is promised a taste of victory even here. Sins are 
forgiven them. It is not in the future alone that they 
will enter into the restored relationship of children to 
their Father. They can know and confirm the truth 
of the words spoken by their Lord many times, “ Thy 
sins are forgiven thee.” And forgiveness means this 
at least: the old bond is re-formed; the prodigal is home 
again. Once more, if this contradiction cannot be 
easily solved in logic, it has been solved in Christian 
experience. 

Where do we go for an account of the nature and 
horror of sin? Not to those who are held by the 
chains of evil habit. There comes a time when that 
which should make them aware of their condition 
ceases to act. As St. Paul put it, “ They are past feel¬ 
ing.” It is to the saints who overcome that we turn 
for an account of sin. Because they are out of its 
power they can see it, and not only that; because they 
are resisting it they can measure its power. Who can 
tell the terrors of a journey through a strange country 
but the man who has made it, and made it to the end? 


154 You Can Find God 

At the same time these authorities upon sin speak 
with quiet certainty of the peace given them by their 
Lord. They are still seeking victory but at the same 
time they are enjoying victory. 

“ But what is God to those who find? ” one may ask. 
The Lord is kind to those who seek; but what is he to 
those who find? There is no answer to that question 
save that what is found passes the power of tongue or 
pen to show. It is the secret which cannot be passed 
on by any word of man. The experience is one to 
which there can be no perfect analogy. We cannot 
say of it, “ It is like this and that.” 

“ The love of Jesus, what it is 
None but his loved ones know.” 

Yet there are certain things which can be said of 
the finders; or rather, certain things can be said of 
that experience of the soul when it is no longer seek¬ 
ing, but rejoicing in the gift of God which it has found. 

The seeker reads the Word, and the seeker who has 
found also reads it. It is the same collection of books 
that is available to both, and the books all have the 
same meaning to the student of the text. The his¬ 
torical records do not change whatever the spiritual 
disposition of the reader may be. But there is a differ¬ 
ence for the soul which has found or, as St. Paul said, 
been found. 

If we have found him of whom these writers speak, 
then we pass through the words to that which lies 
behind and within the words. On the wings of the 
words there comes to us the assurance that the living 
God is speaking to us. We speak of this assurance 


Can Seekers Find Now? 155 

in the language of personal relationships: he is Father, 
Lord, Friend; but such words, the best that we know, 
are only pointers. They show at least that this ap¬ 
proach to the soul is not less than personal. All that 
“ personal ” can convey is found in this word and 
action of God. How much more will God himself 
be to us Father, Lord, Friend! 

It is not alone of Isaiah or Jeremiah or the apostles 
that we are thinking. In their experience we find our¬ 
selves. The God who spoke to them and laid his 
hand upon them in the same records speaks to us. 
There is a new meaning for us in the old word. There 
is the witness of the Spirit. Through the Spirit there 
is given a message old but new to us. No new word, 
but one which we have had from the beginning; but 
it comes fresh to us, as though we were the first to 
hear the word of the Good Shepherd or to feel the 
pressure of that Lord who besets man behind and 
before. To have found is to enter into the scene, 
not as readers, but as living souls, exposed to the burn¬ 
ing and shining light of God who draws near to us, 
to me. 

What is he to those who find him in his church? 
The church is a place for seekers. But when they 
find they have a new experience. Every part of the 
service is charged with a new meaning. The service 
becomes an experience for which the word “ personal ” 
is not enough, and yet it must be used. In the church 
the soul is one of a company which no man can number. 
Its voice is raised in the song which only the redeemed 
can sing. Ten thousand others are with the solitary 
soul. They are making their answer to One who has 
sought them and found them. They are not simply 


156 You Can Find God 

seeking something more for themselves; they are re¬ 
joicing in the gift of God to them. 

There are many reasons why I should go to church. 
Among them this should never be forgotten: I should 
go to take my part in the song of a redeemed world 
in answer to its Redeemer. A seeker I must always 
be, but if I have met in the ways of life with this Re¬ 
deemer, and been found by him, I must go to rejoice 
with all those who share this experience of the glorious 
love of God, which is now mine in part, and will be 
mine wholly forever. 


llllllllllllllllllllllllllllillllllllllll 


iiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiimiir 


EPILOGUE 

WHAT IF YOU DO FIND? 


THERE are moments in which, as life nears its close, 
we go back in memory to its early days. One picture 
from the past comes back to the writer of this book. 
It will serve to bring my word to its end. It is the 
picture of a Lancashire Sunday school of which I was 
a member. I can still call to mind those who were 
boys there when I was a boy. Many of them were 
weavers who would be called early on Monday morn¬ 
ings to go to their looms. The Sunday school had, and 
still has, a place of honor in the life of Lancashire, 
and anyone who has belonged to it will always re¬ 
member it with gratitude. We met in the school 
before we went to our classes, and we sang hymns the 
refrains of which still come back to me. It cannot 
be claimed that they were always good hymns or that 
the music was beautiful. Many of them were deposits 
from the revivals of the past. But truths were pre¬ 
served in them which shine more brightly after many 
years. One chorus ran: 

“ There is life for a look at the Crucified One, 
There is life at this moment for thee.” 

There have been times in which such jingles have 
seemed poor and unworthy. The lines themselves 
may be taken to mean little more than a crude and 





158 You Can Find God 

almost superstitious belief. But the years have made 
it seem less important to discover where such a call 
may be abused than to hold fast to the truth which 
breaks through the words. 

There is life for a look at the Crucified One! The 
one purpose of this book has been to clear the way for 
that critical moment in which we can look at him 
and, looking, begin to live. 

A look! Can it change all things? It was true of 
Job: “ I had heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, 
but now mine eye seeth thee.” It was true of Isaiah: 
“ In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord 
high and lifted up ” ; that look meant new life for the 
young noble of Jerusalem. It was true of Simon Peter, 
who began a new life when “ the Lord turned and 
looked upon him and he went out and wept bitterly.” 
It was true of Saul of Tarsus when a light brighter 
than the sun blinded him and he heard the voice of 
the Crucified: “ I am Jesus, and thou art persecuting 
me.” It was true of St. Augustine, St. Francis of 
Assisi, Ramon Lull, St. Francis Xavier. They looked 
and lived. They might have turned away and been 
lost to the service of God in this world. Others might 
have taken their crown. Others, indeed, had that 
strange sight offered to them, glanced at it and passed 
on; but these looked to the Crucified and their destiny 
was sealed at once and for all time. They looked and 
lived. 

There come hours in life in which the accumulated 
experiences of years are fused into one act and there 
is set before us a choice between this way and that. 
Such a choice becomes an epitome of all the choices 
of all our days. It becomes in the end a question of 


What If You Do Find? 159 

which way we are to look. On the one hand there are 
voices which call us to a life of adventure and hazard, 
the only reward of which must be sought in the love 
of Christ; on the other hand every fiber of our being 
is made to feel the pull of the world of sensible things 
— the comfort, the pride, the glory of it all. We may 
deliberately look this way or that. 

In the story of the cities of the plain we read that 
Lot's wife looked back and was turned into a pillar 
of salt; she looked and died! Of course we do not 
look deliberately towards the cities of the plain, though 
there are such cities still and it is not counted so 
shameful a thing in these days as once it was to have 
residence in them. But for most of those who once 
were living and now are dead columns, shining in 
their whiteness, the choice was not between looking 
back to the cities of the plain or away to the hills. 
They were not tempted by any such manifest cor¬ 
ruption as that which filled Sodom and Gomorrah. 
They looked back to a scene which offered ease and 
wealth, and perhaps fame, provided that the price of 
conformity to its standards was duly paid. But that 
look determined the character of their days. Such 
a look is not a passing glance, it is the response of the 
heart to one of two alternatives which have been be¬ 
fore it for long. It is the look of decision, the look 
of the lover who has made his choice; and there is 
destiny in that look. 

You can look and live. You can also look and pass 
out of life. 

By all means let us read into the word “ salvation ” 
as full a meaning as we can. Let us take life to be the 
scene in which man, by yielding himself to Christ, 


160 You Can Find God 

comes to his true self. Let us include in the redeemed 
life all beauty and truth and holiness. But we need not 
think that we can change the character of the spiritual 
world. It is still through the look of the soul upon the 
Crucified one that the way lies to life. “ There is life at 
this moment for thee.” 

But so tremendous an experience can be had only 
in a world which offers hazards. Life can be a real 
adventure only on the understanding that there are 
perils to be met and that something real hangs upon 
the quest. To walk along a level plain offers no risks, 
but the mountaineer can win the thrill and the glory 
of his days only by running risks. And if there is 
life in a look, that can be only if it is also understood 
that there may be loss of life in a look. If with all 
deliberation, and in full awareness of what the issue 
means, the soul looks back, then, so far as its value 
as a living force in the world can be estimated, it has 
ceased to be. Only a cold and lifeless column rises 
to warn other pilgrims. 

But what will follow if we look? What is this life 
of which we speak? We may think of it as the lowest 
possible measure of change, or we may dare to claim 
the miracles which can still be repeated. 

Faith, like all things human, can be studied in its 
weakness or in its strength. In its weakness it may 
be little more than a faint and trembling desire, with 
little courage and little hope in it. All that can be 
claimed for it on that level is that it is not unbelief; 
and in the desperate situation which faces mankind 
“ he that is not against us is on our part.” But why 
should the man who has found God be measured 
by this mean standard? Is it the way of such a God 


What If You Do Find? 161 

as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to offer his 
Spirit grudgingly? 

On the contrary, there is wealth beyond measure for 
the surrendered soul. There are adventures to be 
run; there is a life of endless fascination. 

You find God. In one swift glance you see him, 
and you know that you are his forever. But you have 
still your life to live on this earth. You are in a world 
which is God's world, and you must walk with him 
there. You will have all your powers to offer to him 
for his use. You will be a citizen of your own city 
and nation, you will belong to the family of God in 
all the world, and in all the many ways of your life 
you will be henceforth pledged to your Lord. 

The beginning of the new life comes when you seek 
and, in seeking, meet the Redeemer who is seeking 
you. That is the beginning; but what will follow? A 
lifetime, if so it may be, in which all that is given in that 
one look will be worked out in patient service to your 
own age. 

There is a just revolt against the belief that the in¬ 
dividual soul can separate itself from the community. 
No ladder is offered you by which you can escape; 
rather, a place in the throng, where men are suffering 
and fighting a hard battle, where the Captain of our 
salvation calls for his own to walk the lines with him. 
It is not the part of the redeemed soul to evade the 
obligations to the common life. In that common life 
Christ is still to be found. The soul that has once 
found him in his Word and in his sacrament must 
still seek for him. It will be a sign that a man has 
really found him if he discovers him where he said 
he would be. 


162 


You Can Find God 


“ I sought thee 'mong the leaves, 

I found thee on the dry and blasted tree, 

I found thee not until I saw the thieves 
There crucified with thee.” * 

We must still see him where men are suffering and 
dying. He has given us his promise to meet us in the 
scenes of human sorrow and pain and want. “ I was 
hungry and ye gave me meat, sick and ye visited me.” 
But when? “ Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least 
of these my brethren, ye did it unto me.” 

The last prayer of the soul. 

In an ever deepening faith, which answers to an 
ever unfolding love, you can find God. 

“ Long have I played, my Lord, the hearer's part, 
And many words of thine are known to me; 
From Hermon and Gennesaret my heart 
Has had thy gifts; but now I must have thee. 

“ In token of thy love to the world's end 

Pour'd out, the bread and wine thou gavest me; 
Thy guest am I, and thou a lavish Friend; 

I take the signs, but hunger still for thee. 

“ My gold, my hours, my hands and feet I give, 

But since thou covetest not mine but me, 

It were not just if I were doom'd to live 
Content with thine, when I am seeking thee. 

* Dora Greenwell. 


l6 3 


What If You Do Find ? 

Less for a slave, but I am not a slave; 

Less for a friend, but more than friends are we; 
I — a lost part of thee, thou cam’st to save — 

I, found at last, demand not thine but thee. 

Enough; since neither thou nor I can rest, 

Heart of the world, I bring the secret key 
That opens ev’ry door within my breast. 

Me thou canst have. And now I must have thee” 











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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


THE author wishes to express his thanks to the follow¬ 
ing authors and publishers for permission to quote 
extracts from their publications: To Laurence Binyon, 
for permission to quote from The Sirens (Macmillan); 
to Victor Gollancz, Ltd., and Edmond Fleg for a 
quotation from the latter's Life of Moses; to Sheed 
and Ward, for a quotation from Johannes Jorgensen's 
Autobiography; to Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 
for quotations from The Life of Romanes , by Ethel 
Romanes; to J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., for a quota¬ 
tion from Baron von Hiigel's Letters to a Niece; to 
Walter de la Mare, for a quotation from Peacock Pie 
(Constable); to Faber and Faber, Ltd., for a quota¬ 
tion from The Rock , by T. S. Eliot 


165 

















































































